The universe is expanding. The universe is expanding. I remember I learned that for the first time a few years ago, learned it as in I heard it or read it then actually thought about it, until it really sank in. The universe is expanding? How? To where? How come? I felt the idea drilling through my brain like a worm. Sometimes it feels like one of the most beautiful things I know, at least one of the strangest.
Any physicists in the readership, forgive me, I’m sure I’ll get this wrong. But here’s what I understand:
First off, many learned people today believe our universe has a birthdate, or one is implied, a moment around 14 billion years ago, i.e., the Big Bang, from which we’ve all been oozing away from ever since.
(Though the idea of a birthday may be silly here since there are theories, accepted by however many, that say time and space came out of the universe in the first place, so any sense of dating isn’t relevant. And that really melts my mind.)
Second, the universe contains galaxies, a few hundred billion of them, one of which is the Milky Way, which houses many star systems including ours, the Solar System. And early in the 20th century, if I have this right, Edwin Hubble and his big-ass telescope were able to figure out that the universe, the grand space container of all this crap, has a finite edge. Plus! The farther another galaxy is from ours, the faster it appears to be traveling away from us – all this dark energy fueling the scattering of all these flocks of stars, dragging behind them their dust and gas, fleeing away from another.
I picture the worst party faux pas, everyone around quickly backing away to escape my, er, my dark energy. I mean, I’m sure the metaphor doesn’t hold up great, astrophysically, but sometimes I do think a rule of the universe, applying to all objects and beings, is the state of the forever lonely, and getting lonelier.
Point three: all of that’s inside the container. But outside the container, on the edge of the vast black lawn, every point is simply expanding, nonplussed. Pressing into whatever it’s pressing into or against. A state of perpetual expansion. Eternal growth. The biggest thing ever, forever adventuring1.
There’s a Carl Sandberg poem named “Moonset Poem” that ends:
All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now.
Only dark listening to dark.
What was the universe previously? Maybe a proto universe. Maybe a stack of turtles, or a neutron in a ballgown made from black holes. I’m not really interested in any of that, maybe because I’m in my Voyager era? As in the NASA program that launched two robotic probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, in 1977. As I write this, Voyager 1 is more than 14 billion miles from Earth. It’s the farthest any human-made thing has ever traveled. Years ago, we hucked the Voyagers out there to see how far they might reach, and I find it reassuring and inspiring to think they’re out there still going, still listening, still keeping their eyes open.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters, three-plus things to love:
A recent album to confirm the pleasure of listening to challenging music
Some non-challenging, low-key, good recent techno and other songs
A bizarre courtroom drama, a better bird-identifying app, and more
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly dispatch from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Supporters receive a Sunday supplement with 3+ things to love, along with a longer piece once a month sent from the road, for some inbox wanderlust. ⛰️
Books mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored in a Bookshop list.
Actually, if I understand it right, there’s also a theory that says growth isn’t an eternal state, that at some point the universe will start to shrink instead, and it’s all a cycle – expand, contract, expand, contract – unfolding as the role of dark energy shifts.