The title of this post isn’t meant to ask where you are in a spatial location, but in terms of time. Where are you—where are we all, for that matter—in the life of this universe? I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. We all live on a rather attractive blue, white, green and brown planet circling a rather ordinary yellow-white star in a rather ordinary galaxy somewhere in the middle of billions of other galaxies which together constitute what we affectionately refer to as the “universe.” This universe arose from a massive expansion of all matter and energy some thirteen billion years ago, and is rapidly expanding and expanding, apparently to go on forever, driven apart by wild forces within itself. It will go on for time immemorial, never to return to its original state. That’s, at least, the current thinking.
Here we are, sophisticated, sentient human beings, watching this all unfold, trying to make sense of it. I’ve wondered, ever since I heard of the “big bang” hypothesis, which is the current favorite explanation of how we got here, if there isn’t an alternative explanation, that the universe will eventually run out of steam and collapse back onto itself in a sort of “big crunch,” or “big splat,” from which it would rebound into another expansion and another universe, and so on, ad infinitum. That seems to me to be a more logical way for the universe to run than just one “bang” which blows up like a balloon and dissipates out in the nether regions, never to be seen again. The “single bang” theory doesn’t explain what came before the expansion, nor what will come after it. But that may be the way it really is. Dark energy seems to be pushing the galaxies apart faster than dark matter can keep them together.
Philosophically, this is mind boggling. We are the only species on this planet that really understands, to any degree whatsoever, the goings-on out there in space. We’ve been watching the skies for thousands of years. We’ve sent satellites into orbit to observe it. We’ve sent men to the moon. Do you think that cat or dog or goldfish or parakeet in your house cares much about the big bang? Do the deer and the wolves in the forest understand that the little red dot in the sky is a cold, solid planet rather than a blazingly hot star? Or even what a star is in the first place? No, just us. Yet we humans make up such a miniscule percentage of the universe, it’s difficult to estimate how many zeros I’d have to put down to the right of a decimal point to give that percentage. We humans are what I might call “universe sentient.” We know where we are, though we can’t travel very far in it. We’ve seen the stars, the Milky Way, and some of the other galaxies that make up our universe. We have a lot to learn, granted. But we are capable of learning it. We have the mathematical skills and computer skills to master the intricacies of the universe. No dog or cat, or even chimpanzee, has that. Most likely, other civilizations exist in our galaxy with similar skills, perhaps even more advanced. (Maybe they can tell us if dark matter and dark energy really exist.) But philosophically we are alone, and, I suspect, will remain alone for the foreseeable future.