For ages people have expected ultimate wisdom coming from the sky. Looking at a clear sky by night with the moon and all the stars is absolutely impressive. When men started building telescopes, followed celestial bodies and slowly understood the concept of planets, it was impressive even more. Today we can build spacecraft, bring a man on the Moon, send observation robots to Mars. What do we really find out there?
Martian surface
The above picture has been made by Mars Pathfinder in 1997, we see a close-up of what the Martian surface looks like. In some aspects the picture looks familiar, it could have been a terrestrial desert. We see stones lying in the sand, two hills on the horizon and the sky behind that. It is easy to imagine there is a road behind us with a car waiting till we finished our little photo stop. It is harder to imagine the desert behind is just as empty as in front of us.
Fact is, there isn’t: no roads, no towns, no waste plastic cups or cigarette butts. No forrest, no plants, no cactuses, not a single snake hiding behind one of the stones.
No life.
Just stones, each different in shape and size, lying randomly in the sand. No organization. You can move ten meters from here and find the same emptiness, a hundred meters, thousand, ten thousand, same thing. The whole planet is empty. In fact you wouldn’t survive here for long, even when the temperature, atmosphere and gravity are moderate, there is sheer lack of resources.
Infinite space
But just imagine you, walking there, with the task of investigating the space. You take the first stone, probe the weight, look at the shape, try to remember. Then take the second one. Than take the third. And so further, and so on. You start getting a notion of the meaning of ‘infinite’. Relative to our human proportions the surface of a planet is ‘infinite’.
And then the universe is filled with an infinite amount of planets, each of them different and, for what we can see, each of them just as empty and lifeless as Mars.
Infinite time
Back to the spot of the photo, it was taken in 1997. You can go back there now and sure you will find the debris of Mars Pathfinder, you will also find the very same stones in the very same position. They were there when you were born, they will be there when you die. They have been there throughout human history, same spot, same position, no change. To our human proportions that’s an infinite amount of time.
But we know the total amount of time is much, much larger. We can deduce a Big Bang, we can calculate when planets have emerged or will disappear again. We know the life span of our solar system is not infinite but even then it is huge.
Infinite scale
You can zoom into the picture and find more detailed detailed information about the stones structure. You can zoom in further and make detailed descriptions of every grain of sand of which each of them might appear a stone of its own right. You can zoom in further and further and further, in fact you can zoom in a trillion time and see the single atoms that the stone is made of.
You can zoom out to see more of the surroundings, to see the planet, the Solar System, the Milky Way. Again the amount of zoom is incredible, the Milky Way is 100,000 lightyears in diameter.
Sure the difference in scale between an atom and the Milky Way is not really infinite. But from a more practical human point of view the range you can go smaller or larger is simply limitless.
A sea of randomness
Then, within this infinite space around us, most that we find is simply random. It starts right at the bottom with quantum particles who appear to have a random generator built right into them. And maybe that’s required to make anything happen at all, without this randomness probably all mater would stick together in exactly the same course.
There is only the scale of atoms and the scale of planets that have a kind of deterministic organized structures. There’s electrons orbiting faithfully around a nucleus, there’s planets orbiting faithfully around a sun. These systems are quite predictable and relatively easy to understand.
Everything between the size of an atom and the size of a planet is subject to the law of entropy that says that over time the amount of “disorder” will increase and the amount of information will minimize.
Planet Earth is the exception
Within this giant space filled with planets that have nothing but desert, sand, dust and stones on their surfaces, there is one breathtaking exception: the surface of planet Earth contains life. It contains a form of organization that somehow opposes the laws of entropy and that has been able, despite the seas of randomness around it, to create increasingly complex and sophisticated structures.
We are the exception.
If we search for one single truth originating outside of us, all we seam to find is infinite amounts of randomness. If we search for wisdom maybe we better look right here, right now, right to ourselves.
You’re onto something there, Berend, in your last paragraph. Though the “randomness” outside yourself is real enough, your search for wisdom should indeed lead you to “you.” If you’re truly wise, and if you’re truly courageous, you’ll be significantly aided in your search with Scientology. (www.scientology.org)