Us and the Universe

Having done some catching up on the universe, what we know about it, and what we are recently attempting to discover with the telescope we are deploying to replace Hubble (i.e - the edge of the universe), I'm struck by the way we (as a planet of human beings) interact with the magnitude, the humanly unfathomable scale of it all, and what that scale seems to do to how we see ourselves.

Recent predictions are that we will actually be able to see back to the earliest moments of the birth of the universe, discovering countless more new galaxies in the process. And with those billions (yes it's with a b) of galaxies, which our astronomers are now convinced to be home to maybe trillions of planets, we are confronting a scale that shatters our invention "God". For if we look past our parochial God, the one who resides in a nearby heaven, invented by superstitious story tellers a couple thousand years back, and expand that all encompassing God out to include the whole know universe, it short-circuits our God character.

To say that God created this known universe to the scale that we now can confront and measure, and did so just for us - our existence, our petty paces, our teeny-tiny little nuclear wars, mass shootings, planetary warming issues, and the current president of the United States - is to so diminish that God as to make him/her's existence comical.

God created billions of galaxies containing billions of suns, home to trillions of planets (or other sundry celestial bodies) all just to entertain a species we call earth-human-beings (we have no idea what God calls earth or us). And that he/she put all of this in place in seven days, which of course doesn't compute with the science (one of those inconvenient truths we are driven to avoid confronting).

According to what I'm seeing and reading, leading astrophysicists now calculate it's likely there is life elsewhere in the universe. It may not be life as we know it or define it, but nonetheless some sort of life. Just the sheer billions of planets estimated to exist with conditions similar to planet earth make this forecast (which depending on the hard wiring in your brain, is either overwhelmingly possible, or undeniably heretical.

I know it's treasonous to suggest we are thrown to our perspective, programmed to insist that our interpretations are truths ("What interpretations? I know reality when I see it!"). And if we could  arrive to a place where we simply don't dismiss our science as fake news, it might be that God, if he/she does exist, didn't just create all this universe for us to observe, explore and/or transform (in science destruction is simply a transformation of energy). There are, excuse me, may-well-be other entities out there who can also grok this existence we call a "universe"!

What continues to puzzle me is how entities as developed as humans, are so driven to avoid confronting evidence of our smallness and lack-of-importance within the context - the scale - of this thing we call the universe. I'm supposing we just can't be with the notion - as grounded on our most focused and intelligent observations as those notions may be - that the universe simply doesn't care about human beings.

Realize that to claim any other conclusion is to demote the universe to the status of organized/existing- just-for-us. Organized just for our pleasure, or amazement, or observation; or perhaps, overwhelm. It occurs to me that the abyss we so desperately avoid facing is the one that says, on a universal scale, we don't matter.

"Of course we matter!", we scream. "How dare you suggest otherwise? You heathen!"

For me, the real opportunity for humans is having us somehow evolve to confront the possibility that the only ones who care if we matter is us. There is no "God-who will-ultimately-keep-us-from-destroying-ourselves, or our environments. There is no "mother nature", who will magically reverse our environmental stupidities to maintain a "balance". In the universal scheme of things, a sweltering hot planet is just another among billions of sweltering hot planets. No big deal!

Nor with trillions of planets to worry about, is "God" going to waste any time patching up our planet. In the universe we are just one form of energy that will, with our ultimate transgressions, devolve to transform to another form of energy, and will do so without pain, struggle, or emotion. The best we can do is speed it up or slow it down. And neither the universe nor our God(s) care about how much time we take.