a essay about universe

The Cosmic Perspective

By Neil deGrasse Tyson

Natural History Magazine

The 100 th essay in the “Universe” series.

Embracing cosmic realities can give us a more enlightened view of human life.

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered… but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices. James Ferguson, Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, And Made Easy To Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics (1757)

Long before anyone knew that the universe had a beginning, before we knew that the nearest large galaxy lies two and a half million light years from Earth, before we knew how stars work or whether atoms exist, James Ferguson’s enthusiastic introduction to his favorite science rang true. Yet his words, apart from their eighteenth-century flourish, could have been written yesterday.

But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farmworker. Not the sweatshop worker. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity’s place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated. By those measures, most citizens of industrialized nations do quite well.

Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth.

When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.

When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day—every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth—people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God kill in the name of their nation’s needs or wants.

When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet choreographed by the forces of gravity, sometimes I forget that too many people act in wanton disregard for the delicate interplay of Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land, with consequences that our children and our children’s children will witness and pay for with their health and well-being.

And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves.

I occasionally forget those things because, however big the world is—in our hearts, our minds, and our outsize atlases—the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.

Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: a broken toy, a scraped knee, a schoolyard bully. Adults know that kids have no clue what constitutes a genuine problem, because inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective.

As grown-ups, dare we admit to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view? Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Apparently not. And the evidence abounds. Part the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers.

Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered each other because of them.

Back in February 2000, the newly rebuilt Hayden Planetarium featured a space show called Passport to the Universe , which took visitors on a virtual zoom from New York City to the edge of the cosmos. En route the audience saw Earth, then the solar system, then the 100 billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy shrink to barely visible dots on the planetarium dome.

Within a month of opening day, I received a letter from an Ivy League professor of psychology whose expertise was things that make people feel insignificant. I never knew one could specialize in such a field. The guy wanted to administer a before-and-after questionnaire to visitors, assessing the depth of their depression after viewing the show. Passport to the Universe, he wrote, elicited the most dramatic feelings of smallness he had ever experienced.

How could that be? Every time I see the space show (and others we’ve produced), I feel alive and spirited and connected. I also feel large, knowing that the goings-on within the three-pound human brain are what enabled us to figure out our place in the universe.

Allow me to suggest that it’s the professor, not I, who has misread nature. His ego was too big to begin with, inflated by delusions of significance and fed by cultural assumptions that human beings are more important than everything else in the universe.

In all fairness to the fellow, powerful forces in society leave most of us susceptible. As was I … until the day I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information makes you think twice about who—or what—is actually in charge.

From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly 4 billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.

know what you’re thinking: we’re smarter than bacteria.

No doubt about it, we’re smarter than every other living creature that ever walked, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that? We cook our food. We compose poetry and music. We do art and science. We’re good at math. Even if you’re bad at math, you’re probably much better at it than the smartest chimpanzee, whose genetic identity varies in only trifling ways from ours. Try as they might, primatologists will never get a chimpanzee to learn the multiplication table or do long division.

If small genetic differences between us and our fellow apes account for our vast difference in intelligence, maybe that difference in intelligence is not so vast after all.

Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee’s. To such a species our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door. These creatures would study Stephen Hawking (who occupies the same endowed professorship once held by Newton at the University of Cambridge) because he’s slightly more clever than other humans, owing to his ability to do theoretical astrophysics and other rudimentary calculations in his head.

If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we’re distant and distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within.

Need more ego softeners? Simple comparisons of quantity, size, and scale do the job well.

Take water. It’s simple, common, and vital. There are more molecules of water in an eight-ounce cup of the stuff than there are cups of water in all the world’s oceans. Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.

How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid.

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light takes time to reach Earth’s observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were. That means the universe acts like a giant time machine: the farther away you look, the further back in time you see—back almost to the beginning of time itself. Within that horizon of reckoning, cosmic evolution unfolds continuously, in full view.

Want to know what we’re made of? Again, the cosmic perspective offers a bigger answer than you might expect. The chemical elements of the universe are forged in the fires of high-mass stars that end their lives in stupendous explosions, enriching their host galaxies with the chemical arsenal of life as we know it. The result? The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.

Yes, we are stardust. But we may not be of this Earth. Several separate lines of research, when considered together, have forced investigators to reassess who we think we are and where we think we came from.

First, computer simulations show that when a large asteroid strikes a planet, the surrounding areas can recoil from the impact energy, catapulting rocks into space. From there, they can travel to—and land on—other planetary surfaces. Second, microorganisms can be hardy. Some survive the extremes of temperature, pressure, and radiation inherent in space travel. If the rocky flotsam from an impact hails from a planet with life, microscopic fauna could have stowed away in the rocks’ nooks and crannies. Third, recent evidence suggests that shortly after the formation of our solar system, Mars was wet, and perhaps fertile, even before Earth was.

Those findings mean it’s conceivable that life began on Mars and later seeded life on Earth, a process known as panspermia. So all earthlings might—just might—be descendants of Martians.

Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe.

Today, how easy it is to presume that one universe is all there is. Yet emerging theories of modern cosmology, as well as the continually reaffirmed improbability that anything is unique, require that we remain open to the latest assault on our plea for distinctiveness: multiple universes, otherwise known as the  multiverse , in which ours is just one of countless bubbles bursting forth from the fabric of the cosmos.

The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it’s more than just what you know. It’s also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:

• The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it’s not solely the province of the scientist. The cosmic perspective belongs to everyone.
• The cosmic perspective is humble.
• The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.
• The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.
• The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told.
• The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place.
• The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment, the only home we have.
• The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.
• The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.
• The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag waving and space exploration do not mix.
• The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.

At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.

Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.

During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it’s fun to do. But there’s a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their “low contracted prejudices.” And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective.

May 21, 2013

12 min read

Origin of the Universe

Cosmologists are closing in on the ultimate processes that created and shaped the universe

By Michael S. Turner

The universe is big in both space and time and, for much of humankind's history, was beyond the reach of our instruments and our minds. That changed dramatically in the 20th century. The advances were driven equally by powerful ideas—from Einstein's general relativity to modern theories of the elementary particles—and powerful instruments—from the 100- and 200-inch reflectors that George Ellery Hale built, which took us beyond our Milky Way galaxy, to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has taken us back to the birth of galaxies. Over the past 30 years the pace of progress has accelerated with the realization that dark matter is not made of ordinary atoms, the discovery of dark energy, and the dawning of bold ideas such as cosmic inflation and the multiverse.

The universe of 100 years ago was simple: eternal, unchanging, consisting of a single galaxy, containing a few million visible stars. The picture today is more complete and much richer. The cosmos began 13.7 billion years ago with the big bang. A fraction of a second after the beginning, the universe was a hot, formless soup of the most elementary particles, quarks and leptons. As it expanded and cooled, layer on layer of structure developed: neutrons and protons, atomic nuclei, atoms, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and finally superclusters. The observable part of the universe is now inhabited by 100 billion galaxies, each containing 100 billion stars and probably a similar number of planets. Galaxies themselves are held together by the gravity of the mysterious dark matter. The universe continues to expand and indeed does so at an accelerating pace, driven by dark energy, an even more mysterious form of energy whose gravitational force repels rather than attracts.

The overarching theme in our universe's story is the evolution from the simplicity of the quark soup to the complexity we see today in galaxies, stars, planets and life. These features emerged one by one over billions of years, guided by the basic laws of physics. In our journey back to the beginning of creation, cosmologists first travel through the well-established history of the universe back to the first microsecond; then to within 10

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−34 second of the beginning, for which ideas are well formed but the evidence is not yet firm; and finally to the earliest moments of creation, for which our ideas are still just speculation. Although the ultimate origin of the universe still lies beyond our grasp, we have tantalizing conjectures, including the notion of the multiverse, whereby the universe comprises an infinite number of disconnected subuniverses.

Expanding Universe

Using the 100-inch Hooker telescope on Mount Wilson in 1924, Edwin Hubble showed that fuzzy nebulae, studied and speculated about for several hundred years, were galaxies just like our own—thereby enlarging the known universe by 100 billion. A few years later he showed that galaxies are moving apart from one another in a regular pattern described by a mathematical relation now known as Hubble's law, according to which galaxies that are farther away are moving faster. It is Hubble's law, played back in time, that points to a big bang 13.7 billion years ago.

Hubble's law found ready interpretation within general relativity: space itself is expanding, and galaxies are being carried along for the ride [ see box on opposite page ]. Light, too, is being stretched, or redshifted—a process that saps its energy, so that the universe cools as it expands. Cosmic expansion provides the narrative for understanding how today's universe came to be. As cosmologists imagine rewinding the clock, the universe becomes denser, hotter, more extreme and simpler. In exploring the beginning, we also probe the inner workings of nature by taking advantage of an accelerator more powerful than any built on Earth—the big bang itself.

By looking out into space with telescopes, astronomers peer back in time—and the larger the telescope, the farther back they peer. The light from distant galaxies reveals an earlier epoch, and the amount this light has redshifted indicates how much the universe has grown in the intervening years. The current record holder has a redshift of more than 10, representing a time when the universe was less than one-eleventh its present size and only a few hundred million years old. Telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the 10-meter Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea routinely take us back to the epoch when galaxies like ours were forming, a few billion years after the big bang. Light from even earlier times is so strongly redshifted that astronomers must look for it in the infrared and radio bands. Telescopes such as the planned James Webb Space Telescope, a 6.5-meter infrared telescope, and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a network of 66 radio dishes already operating in northern Chile, can take us back to the birth of the very first stars and galaxies.

Computer simulations say that those stars and galaxies emerged when the universe was about 100 million years old. Before then, the universe went through a time called the “dark ages,” when it was almost pitch-black. Space was filled with a featureless gruel, five parts dark matter and one part hydrogen and helium, that thinned out as the universe expanded. Matter was slightly uneven in density, and gravity acted to amplify these density variations: denser regions expanded more slowly than less dense ones did. By 100 million years the densest regions did not merely expand more slowly but actually started to collapse. Such regions contained about one million solar masses of material each. They were the first gravitationally bound objects in the cosmos.

Dark matter accounted for the bulk of their mass but was, as its name suggests, unable to emit or absorb light. So it remained in an extended cloud. Hydrogen and helium gas, on the other hand, emitted light, lost energy and became concentrated in the center of the cloud. Eventually it collapsed all the way down to stars. These first stars were much more massive than today's—hundreds of solar masses. They lived very short lives before exploding and leaving behind the first heavy elements. Over the next billion years or so the force of gravity assembled these million-solar-mass clouds into the first galaxies.

Radiation emitted from primordial hydrogen clouds, which were greatly redshifted by the expansion, should be detectable by giant arrays of radio antennas with a total collecting area of up to one square kilometer. When built, these arrays will watch as the first generation of stars and galaxies ionize the hydrogen and bring the dark ages to an end.

Faint Glow of a Hot Beginning

Beyond the dark ages is the glow of the hot big bang at a redshift of 1,100. This radiation has been redshifted from visible light (a red-orange glow) beyond even the infrared to microwaves. What we see from that time is a wall of microwave radiation filling the sky—the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), discovered in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. It provides a glimpse of the universe at the tender age of 380,000 years, the period when atoms formed. Before then, the universe was a nearly uniform soup of atomic nuclei, electrons and photons. As it cooled to a temperature of about 3,000 kelvins, the nuclei and electrons came together to form atoms. Photons ceased to scatter off electrons and streamed across space unhindered, revealing the universe at a simpler time before the existence of stars and galaxies.

In 1992 NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite discovered that the intensity of the CMB has slight variations—about 0.001 percent—reflecting a slight lumpiness in the distribution of matter. The degree of primordial lumpiness was enough to act as seeds for the galaxies and larger structures that would later emerge from the action of gravity. The pattern of these variations in the CMB across the sky also encodes basic properties of the universe, such as its overall density and composition, as well as hints about its earliest moments; the careful study of these variations has revealed much about the universe [ see illustration on page 41 ].

As we roll a movie of the universe's evolution back from that point, we see the primordial plasma becoming ever hotter and denser. Prior to about 100,000 years, the energy density of radiation exceeded that of matter, which kept matter from clumping. Therefore, this time marks the beginning of gravitational assembly of all the structure seen in the universe today. Still further back, when the universe was less than a second old, atomic nuclei had yet to form; only their constituent particles—namely, protons and neutrons—existed. Nuclei emerged when the universe was seconds old and the temperatures and densities were just right for nuclear reactions. This process of big bang nucleosynthesis produced only the lightest elements in the periodic table: a lot of helium (about 25 percent of the atoms in the universe by mass) and smaller amounts of lithium and the isotopes deuterium and helium 3. The rest of the plasma (about 75 percent) stayed in the form of protons that would eventually become hydrogen atoms. All the rest of the elements in the periodic table formed billions of years later in stars and stellar explosions.

Nucleosynthesis theory accurately predicts the abundances of elements and isotopes measured in the most primeval samples of the universe—namely, the oldest stars and high-redshift gas clouds. The abundance of deuterium, which is very sensitive to the density of atoms in the universe, plays a special role: its measured value implies that ordinary matter amounts to 4.5 ± 0.1 percent of the total energy density. (The remainder is dark matter and dark energy.) This estimate agrees precisely with the composition that has been gleaned from the analysis of the CMB. This correspondence is a great triumph. That these two very different measures, one based on nuclear physics when the universe was a second old and the other based on atomic physics when the universe was 380,000 years old, agree is a strong check not just on our model of how the cosmos evolved but on all of modern physics.

Answers in the Quark Soup

Earlier than a microsecond, even protons and neutrons could not exist and the universe was a soup of nature's basic building blocks: quarks, leptons, and the force carriers (photons, the W and Z bosons, and gluons). We can be confident that the quark soup existed because experiments at particle accelerators have re-created similar conditions here on Earth today.

To explore this epoch, cosmologists rely not on bigger and better telescopes but also on powerful ideas from particle physics. The development of the Standard Model of particle physics 30 years ago has led to bold speculations, including string theory, about how the seemingly disparate fundamental particles and forces are unified. As it turns out, these new ideas have implications for cosmology that are as important as the original idea of the hot big bang. They hint at deep and unexpected connections between the world of the very big and of the very small. Answers to three key questions—the nature of dark matter, the asymmetry between matter and antimatter, and the origin of the lumpy quark soup itself—have been starting to emerge.

It now appears that the early quark soup phase was the birthplace of dark matter. The identity of dark matter remains unclear, but its existence is very well established. Our galaxy and every other galaxy, as well as clusters of galaxies, are held together by the gravity of unseen dark matter. Whatever the dark matter is, it must interact weakly with ordinary matter; otherwise it would have shown itself in other ways. Attempts to find a unifying framework for the forces and particles of nature have led to the prediction of stable or long-lived particles that might constitute dark matter. Some of these hypothetical particles would be present today as remnants of the quark soup phase in the correct numbers to be the dark matter and could even be detected.

One candidate is the called the neutralino, the lightest of a putative new class of particles that are heavier counterparts of the known particles. The neutralino is thought to have a mass between 100 and 1,000 times that of the proton, just within the reach of experiments now under way at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva. Physicists have also built ultrasensitive underground detectors, as well as satellite and balloon-borne varieties, to look for this particle or the by-products of its interactions.

A second candidate is the axion, a superlightweight particle about one-trillionth the mass of the electron. Its existence is hinted at by subtleties that the Standard Model predicts in the behavior of quarks. Efforts to detect it exploit the fact that in a very strong magnetic field, an axion can transform into a photon. Both neutralinos and axions have the important property that they are, in a specific technical sense, “cold.” Although they formed under broiling hot conditions, they were slow-moving and thus easily clumped into galaxies.

The early quark soup phase probably also holds the secret to why the universe today contains mostly matter rather than both matter and antimatter. Physicists think the universe originally had equal amounts of each, but at some point it developed a slight excess of matter—about one extra quark for every billion antiquarks. This imbalance ensured that enough quarks would survive annihilation with antiquarks as the universe expanded and cooled. More than 40 years ago accelerator experiments revealed that the laws of physics are ever so slightly biased in favor of matter, and in a still to be understood series of particle interactions very early on, this slight bias led to the creation of the quark excess.

The quark soup itself is thought to have arisen at an extremely early time—perhaps 10

−34 second after the big bang in a burst of cosmic expansion known as inflation. This burst, driven by the energy of a new field (thought to be distantly related to the recently discovered Higgs field) called the inflaton, would explain such basic properties of the cosmos as its general uniformity and the lumpiness that seeded galaxies and other structures in the universe. As the inflaton field decayed away, it released its remaining energy into quarks and other particles, thereby creating the heat of the big bang and the quark soup itself.

Inflation leads to a profound connection between the quarks and the cosmos: quantum fluctuations in the inflaton field on the subatomic scale get blown up to astrophysical size by the rapid expansion and become the seeds for all the structure we see today. In other words, the pattern seen on the CMB sky is a giant image of the subatomic world. Observations of the CMB agree with this prediction, providing the strongest evidence that inflation or something like it occurred very early in the history of the universe.

Birth of the Universe

As cosmologists try to go even further to understand the beginning of the universe itself, our ideas become less firm. Einstein's general theory of relativity has provided the theoretical foundation for a century of progress in our understanding of the evolution of the universe. Because the general theory of relativity does not incorporate quantum theory, the other pillar of contemporary physics, it cannot be relied upon to address the very earliest moments of creation when quantum gravity effects should have been important. The discipline's greatest challenge is to develop a quantum theory of gravity, with which we will be able to address the so-called Planck era prior to about 10

−43 second, when spacetime itself was taking shape.

Tentative attempts at a unified theory have led to some remarkable speculations about our very beginnings. String theory, for example, predicts the existence of additional dimensions of space and possibly other universes floating in that larger space. What we call the big bang may have been the collision of our universe with another. The marriage of string theory with the concept of inflation has led to perhaps the boldest idea yet, that of a multiverse—namely, that the universe comprises an infinite number of disconnected pieces, each with its own local laws of physics.

The multiverse concept, which is still in its infancy, turns on two key theoretical findings. First, the equations describing inflation strongly suggest that if inflation happened once, it should happen again and again, with an infinite number of inflationary regions created over time. Nothing can travel between these regions, so they have no effect on one another. Second, string theory suggests that these regions have different physical parameters, such as the number of spatial dimensions and the kinds of stable particles.

The idea of the multiverse provides novel answers to two of the biggest questions in all of science: what happened before the big bang and why the laws of physics are as they are (Albert Einstein's famous musing about “whether God had any choice” about the laws). The multiverse makes moot the question of what happened before the big bang because there were an infinite number of big bang beginnings, each triggered by its own burst of inflation. Likewise, Einstein's question is pushed aside: within the infinity of universes, all possibilities for the laws of physics have been tried, so there is no particular reason for the laws that govern our universe.

Cosmologists have mixed feelings about the multiverse. If the disconnected subuniverses are truly incommunicado, we cannot hope to test their existence; they seem to lie beyond the realm of science. Part of me wants to scream, One universe at a time, please! On the other hand, the multiverse solves various conceptual problems. If correct, it will make Hubble's enlargement of the universe by a mere factor of 100 billion and Copernicus's banishment of Earth from the center of the universe in the 16th century seem like small advances in the understanding of our place in the cosmos.

Modern cosmology has humbled us. We are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, which together account for only 4.5 percent of the universe, and we exist only because of subtle connections between the very small and the very large. Events guided by the microscopic laws of physics allowed matter to dominate over antimatter, generated the lumpiness that seeded galaxies, filled space with dark matter particles that provide the gravitational infrastructure, and ensured that dark matter could build galaxies before dark energy became significant and the expansion began to accelerate [ see box above ]. At the same time, cosmology by its very nature is arrogant. The idea that we can understand something as vast in both space and time as our universe is, on the face of it, preposterous. This strange mix of humility and arrogance has gotten us pretty far in the past century in advancing our understanding of the present universe and its origin. I am bullish on further progress in the coming years, and I firmly believe we are living in a golden age of cosmology.

• The Universe

The Universe is everything we can touch, feel, sense, measure or detect. It includes living things, planets, stars, galaxies, dust clouds, light, and even time. Before the birth of the Universe, time, space and matter did not exist.

The Universe contains billions of galaxies, each containing millions or billions of stars. The space between the stars and galaxies is largely empty. However, even places far from stars and planets contain scattered particles of dust or a few hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter. Space is also filled with radiation (e.g. light and heat), magnetic fields and high energy particles (e.g. cosmic rays).

The Universe is incredibly huge. It would take a modern jet fighter more than a million years to reach the nearest star to the Sun. Travelling at the speed of light (300,000 km per second), it would take 100,000 years to cross our Milky Way galaxy alone.

No one knows the exact size of the Universe, because we cannot see the edge – if there is one. All we do know is that the visible Universe is at least 93 billion light years across. (A light year is the distance light travels in one year – about 9 trillion km.)

The Universe has not always been the same size. Scientists believe it began in a Big Bang, which took place nearly 14 billion years ago. Since then, the Universe has been expanding outward at very high speed. So the area of space we now see is billions of times bigger than it was when the Universe was very young. The galaxies are also moving further apart as the space between them expands.

Story of the Universe

• Extreme life
• In the beginning
• The Big Bang
• The birth of galaxies
• What is space?
• Black Holes
• The mystery of the dark Universe
• Cosmic distances

What is the universe made of?

Matter and energy are the two basic components of the entire Universe. An enormous challenge for scientists is that most of the matter in the Universe is invisible and the source of most of the energy is not understood. How can we study the Universe if we can’t see most of it?

As our tools for observation grow more sophisticated, scientists at Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian will continue to be at the forefront of dark matter and dark energy research.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical telescopes help map the distribution of dark matter in colliding galaxy clusters, like the Bullet Cluster. X-ray observations show a heated shock front where the gas from the clusters collided and slowed down, but gravitational lensing measurements show that dark matter was unaffected by the collision and separate from the normal matter.

It is theorized that when some dark matter particles collide, they annihilate and disappear in a flash of high-energy radiation. The Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) in Arizona, which can detect gamma-ray radiation, is looking for the signature of dark matter annihilation.

The South Pole Telescope in Antarctica and Chandra are placing limits on dark energy by looking for its effects on galaxy cluster evolution throughout the history of the Universe. By comparing observations of galaxy clusters with experimental models, researchers are studying how dark energy competed with gravity throughout the history of the Universe.

Scientists at CfA have led the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), analyzing millions of galaxies and charting their distribution in the Universe. The distribution has been shown to trace sound waves from the early Universe, like ripples in a pond, where some regions have higher numbers of galaxies, and others have less. Looking at these distributions, we can more accurately measure the distance to galaxies and map the effects of dark energy.

On the horizon, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will create a 3D map of the Universe, containing millions of galaxies out to 10 billion light years. This map will measure dark energy’s effect on the expansion of the Universe. And the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will observe billions of galaxies and discover unprecedented numbers of supernovae, constraining the properties of dark matter and dark energy.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

Astronomer Fritz Zwicky was the first to notice the discrepancy between the amount of visible matter in a cluster of galaxies and the motions of the galaxies themselves. He suggested that there may be invisible matter, or what he called “dark matter”, interacting gravitationally with the visible matter. Later, astronomers noticed similar incongruities when observing nearby spiral galaxies. The outer edges of the galaxies rotated much faster than expected, suggesting “dark matter” existed throughout and extended beyond the visible galaxy.

Today, we can estimate the amount of dark matter in a galaxy based on how it causes light from a background source to bend. Using this “gravitational lensing” technique, we can measure the severity of that bend to get an idea of the galaxy’s mass. When the mass we calculate from the bend and the mass we can observe directly don’t agree, we know dark matter must be present.

Modern calculations say dark matter comprises about 27% of the Universe. We don’t yet know what it is, but we are searching for answers.

We have known that the Universe is expanding since the early 20th century. But recent observations of distant supernovae and other observations show that the Universe is not only expanding, but the expansion is accelerating. This astonishing discovery came as a complete surprise because the expansion of the Universe should slow down with time because of the gravitational attraction between galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The unseen repellant force required to explain this observation has been labelled “dark energy,” and current models say it makes up about 68% of the Universe.

That leaves only 5% of the Universe that is visible to us. 

Supernova 1994D in this image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope might look like a star, but it's the explosion of a white dwarf that nearly outshone an entire galaxy. Such supernovas — known as type Ia — are extremely similar to each other, allowing astronomers to use them to measure the rate of the expansion of the universe.

What We Know and What We Think

While we can’t see dark matter, we know it’s there. And we can investigate some of dark matter’s properties using gravitational lensing. This technique measures the gravitational pull galaxies exert on light from more distant sources. The warping and magnification of this light gives us insight into the amount, density, and distribution of dark matter in any given lensing galaxy. Theoretically, the current best explanation we have for dark matter is the existence of WIMPs, or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. These theoretical particles should have certain predictable behaviors, but directly observing them and their byproducts so far has proved elusive.

As for dark energy, Einstein had assumed the Universe was static, neither expanding nor collapsing. However, his Theory of General Relativity predicted that the Universe was not static, and so he added a “cosmological constant,” to oppose gravity. He later called it the “biggest blunder” of his life after Hubble demonstrated that the Universe was expanding.

The discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating revived the idea of the cosmological constant. The simplest interpretation of this constant is that it represents the energy of empty space. This “vacuum energy” is constant throughout space and time.

Another interpretation is that dark energy might be an energy field that varies over time and space. Or, perhaps we do not fully understand gravity. For example, maybe it acts differently on enormous scales. Astronomers are currently testing modifications to General Relativity to see if they can explain the Universe’s accelerating expansion.

• Moons and Satellites
• Neutron Stars and White Dwarfs
• Planetary Geology
• Planetary Nebulas
• Spectroscopy
• Star Clusters
• Star Formation
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• Stellar Structure and Evolution
• Supernovas & Remnants
• Variable Stars and Binaries
• Astrochemistry
• Atomic & Molecular Data
• Cosmic Microwave Background
• Dark Energy and Dark Matter
• Elemental Abundances
• Laboratory Astrophysics
• Stellar Astronomy
• Atomic and Molecular Physics
• Optical and Infrared Astronomy
• Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences
• Theoretical Astrophysics

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A Smithsonian magazine special report

What Is the Universe? Real Physics Has Some Mind-Bending Answers

Science says the universe could be a hologram, a computer program, a black hole or a bubble—and there are ways to check

Victoria Jaggard

The questions are as big as the universe and (almost) as old as time: Where did I come from, and why am I here? That may sound like a query for a philosopher, but if you crave a more scientific response, try asking a cosmologist.

This branch of physics is hard at work trying to decode the nature of reality by matching mathematical theories with a bevy of evidence. Today most cosmologists think that the universe was created during the big bang about 13.8 billion years ago, and it is expanding at an ever-increasing rate . The cosmos is woven into a fabric we call space-time, which is embroidered with a cosmic web of brilliant galaxies and invisible dark matter .

It sounds a little strange, but piles of pictures, experimental data and models compiled over decades can back up this description. And as new information gets added to the picture, cosmologists are considering even wilder ways to describe the universe—including some outlandish proposals that are nevertheless rooted in solid science:

The universe is a hologram

Look at a standard hologram, printed on a 2D surface, and you’ll see a 3D projection of the image. Decrease the size of the individual dots that make up the image, and the hologram gets sharper. In the 1990s, physicists realized that something like this could be happening with our universe.

Classical physics describes the fabric of space-time as a four-dimensional structure, with three dimensions of space and one of time. Einstein’s theory of general relativity says that, at its most basic level, this fabric should be smooth and continuous. But that was before quantum mechanics leapt onto the scene. While relativity is great at describing the universe on visible scales, quantum physics tells us all about the way things work on the level of atoms and subatomic particles. According to quantum theories, if you examine the fabric of space-time close enough, it should be made of teeny-tiny grains of information, each a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton.

Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind and Nobel prize winner Gerard ‘t Hooft have each presented calculations showing what happens when you try to combine quantum and relativistic descriptions of space-time. They found that, mathematically speaking, the fabric should be a 2D surface, and the grains should act like the dots in a vast cosmic image, defining the “resolution” of our 3D universe. Quantum mechanics also tells us that these grains should experience random jitters that might occasionally blur the projection and thus be detectable. Last month, physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory started collecting data with a highly sensitive arrangement of lasers and mirrors called the Holometer . This instrument is finely tuned to pick up miniscule motion in space-time and reveal whether it is in fact grainy at the smallest scale. The experiment should gather data for at least a year, so we may know soon enough if we’re living in a hologram.

The universe is a computer simulation

Just like the plot of the Matrix , you may be living in a highly advanced computer program and not even know it. Some version of this thinking has been debated since long before Keanu uttered his first “whoa”. Plato wondered if the world as we perceive it is an illusion , and modern mathematicians grapple with the reason math is universal—why is it that no matter when or where you look, 2 + 2 must always equal 4? Maybe because that is a fundamental part of the way the universe was coded.

In 2012, physicists at the University of Washington in Seattle said that if we do live in a digital simulation, there might be a way to find out . Standard computer models are based on a 3D grid, and sometimes the grid itself generates specific anomalies in the data. If the universe is a vast grid, the motions and distributions of high-energy particles called cosmic rays may reveal similar anomalies—a glitch in the Matrix—and give us a peek at the grid’s structure. A 2013 paper by MIT engineer Seth Lloyd  builds the case for an intriguing spin on the concept: If space-time is made of quantum bits, the universe must be one giant quantum computer . Of course, both notions raise a troubling quandary: If the universe is a computer program, who or what wrote the code?

The universe is a black hole

Any “Astronomy 101”  book  will tell you that the universe burst into being during the big bang. But what existed  before  that point, and what triggered the explosion? A  2010 paper by Nikodem Poplawski , then at Indiana University, made the case that our universe was forged inside a really big  black hole .

While  Stephen Hawking  keeps changing his mind, the popular definition of a black hole is a region of space-time so dense that, past a certain point, nothing can escape its gravitational pull. Black holes are born when dense packets of matter collapse in on themselves, such as during the deaths of especially hefty stars. Some versions of the equations that describe black holes go on to say that the compressed matter does not fully collapse into a point—or singularity—but instead bounces back, spewing out hot, scrambled matter.

Poplawski crunched the numbers and found that observations of the shape and composition of the universe match the mathematical picture of a black hole being born. The initial collapse would equal the big bang, and everything in and around us would be made from the cooled, rearranged components of that scrambled matter. Even better, the theory suggests that all the black holes in our universe may themselves be the gateways to alternate realities. So how do we test it? This model is based on black holes that spin, because that rotation is part of what prevents the original matter from fully collapsing. Poplawski says we should be able to see an echo of the spin inherited from our “parent” black hole in surveys of galaxies, with vast clusters moving in a slight, but potentially detectable, preferred direction.

The universe is a bubble in an ocean of universes

Another cosmic puzzle comes up when you consider what happened in the first slivers of a second after the big bang. Maps of relic light emitted shortly after the universe was born tell us that baby space-time grew exponentially in the blink of an eye before settling into a more sedate rate of expansion. This process, called inflation, is pretty popular among cosmologists, and it got a further boost this year with the potential (but still unconfirmed)  discovery of ripples in space-time called gravitational waves , which would have been products of the rapid growth spurt.

If inflation is confirmed, some theorists would argue that we must live in a frothy sea of multiple universes. Some of the  earliest models of inflation  say that before the big bang, space-time contained what’s known as a false vacuum, a high-energy field devoid of matter and radiation that is inherently unstable. To reach a stable state, the vacuum began to bubble like a pot of boiling water. With each bubble, a new universe was born, giving rise to an  endless multiverse .

The trouble with testing this idea is that the cosmos is ridiculously huge—the observable universe stretches for about 46 billion light years in all directions—and even our best telescopes can’t hope to peer at the surface of a bubble this big. One option, then, is to look for any evidence of our bubble universe colliding with another. Today our best maps of the big bang’s relic light do show an  unusual cold spot in the sky  that could be a “bruise” from bumping into a cosmic neighbor. Or it could be a statistical fluke. So a team of researchers led by Carroll Wainwright at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been running computer models to figure out what  other sorts of traces  a bubbly collision would leave in the big bang’s echo.

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Victoria Jaggard | | READ MORE

Victoria Jaggard is the science editor for Smithsonian.com. Her writing has appeared in Chemical & Engineering News , National Geographic , New Scientist and elsewhere.

Photo by Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Is the Universe a conscious mind?

Cosmopsychism might seem crazy, but it provides a robust explanatory model for how the universe became fine-tuned for life.

by Philip Goff   + BIO

In the past 40 or so years, a strange fact about our Universe gradually made itself known to scientists: the laws of physics, and the initial conditions of our Universe, are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. It turns out that, for life to be possible, the numbers in basic physics – for example, the strength of gravity, or the mass of the electron – must have values falling in a certain range. And that range is an incredibly narrow slice of all the possible values those numbers can have. It is therefore incredibly unlikely that a universe like ours would have the kind of numbers compatible with the existence of life. But, against all the odds, our Universe does.

Here are a few of examples of this fine-tuning for life:

• The strong nuclear force (the force that binds together the elements in the nucleus of an atom) has a value of 0.007. If that value had been 0.006 or less, the Universe would have contained nothing but hydrogen. If it had been 0.008 or higher, the hydrogen would have fused to make heavier elements. In either case, any kind of chemical complexity would have been physically impossible. And without chemical complexity there can be no life.
• The physical possibility of chemical complexity is also dependent on the masses of the basic components of matter: electrons and quarks. If the mass of a down quark had been greater by a factor of 3, the Universe would have contained only hydrogen. If the mass of an electron had been greater by a factor of 2.5, the Universe would have contained only neutrons: no atoms at all, and certainly no chemical reactions.
• Gravity seems a momentous force but it is actually much weaker than the other forces that affect atoms, by about 10 36 . If gravity had been only slightly stronger, stars would have formed from smaller amounts of material, and consequently would have been smaller, with much shorter lives. A typical sun would have lasted around 10,000 years rather than 10 billion years, not allowing enough time for the evolutionary processes that produce complex life. Conversely, if gravity had been only slightly weaker, stars would have been much colder and hence would not have exploded into supernovae. This also would have rendered life impossible, as supernovae are the main source of many of the heavy elements that form the ingredients of life.

Some take the fine-tuning to be simply a basic fact about our Universe: fortunate perhaps, but not something requiring explanation. But like many scientists and philosophers, I find this implausible. In The Life of the Cosmos (1999), the physicist Lee Smolin has estimated that, taking into account all of the fine-tuning examples considered, the chance of life existing in the Universe is 1 in 10 229 , from which he concludes:

In my opinion, a probability this tiny is not something we can let go unexplained. Luck will certainly not do here; we need some rational explanation of how something this unlikely turned out to be the case.

The two standard explanations of the fine-tuning are theism and the multiverse hypothesis. Theists postulate an all-powerful and perfectly good supernatural creator of the Universe, and then explain the fine-tuning in terms of the good intentions of this creator. Life is something of great objective value; God in Her goodness wanted to bring about this great value, and hence created laws with constants compatible with its physical possibility. The multiverse hypothesis postulates an enormous, perhaps infinite, number of physical universes other than our own, in which many different values of the constants are realised. Given a sufficient number of universes realising a sufficient range of the constants, it is not so improbable that there will be at least one universe with fine-tuned laws.

Both of these theories are able to explain the fine-tuning. The problem is that, on the face of it, they also make false predictions. For the theist, the false prediction arises from the problem of evil . If one were told that a given universe was created by an all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful being, one would not expect that universe to contain enormous amounts of gratuitous suffering. One might not be surprised to find it contained intelligent life, but one would be surprised to learn that life had come about through the gruesome process of natural selection. Why would a loving God who could do absolutely anything choose to create life that way? Prima facie theism predicts a universe that is much better than our own and, because of this, the flaws of our Universe count strongly against the existence of God.

Turning to the multiverse hypothesis, the false prediction arises from the so-called Boltzmann brain problem, named after the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann who first formulated the paradox of the observed universe. Assuming there is a multiverse, you would expect our Universe to be a fairly typical member of the universe ensemble, or at least a fairly typical member of the universes containing observers (since we couldn’t find ourselves in a universe in which observers are impossible). However, in The Road to Reality (2004), the physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose has calculated that in the kind of multiverse most favoured by contemporary physicists – based on inflationary cosmology and string theory – for every observer who observes a smooth, orderly universe as big as ours, there are 10 to the power of 10 123 who observe a smooth, orderly universe that is just 10 times smaller. And by far the most common kind of observer would be a ‘Boltzmann’s brain’: a functioning brain that has by sheer fluke emerged from a disordered universe for a brief period of time. If Penrose is right, then the odds of an observer in the multiverse theory finding itself in a large, ordered universe are astronomically small. And hence the fact that we are ourselves such observers is powerful evidence against the multiverse theory.

Neither of these are knock-down arguments. Theists can try to come up with reasons why God would allow the suffering we find in the Universe, and multiverse theorists can try to fine-tune their theory such that our Universe is less unlikely. However, both of these moves feel ad hoc , fiddling to try to save the theory rather than accepting that, on its most natural interpretation, the theory is falsified. I think we can do better.

I n the public mind, physics is on its way to giving us a complete account of the nature of space, time and matter. We are not there yet of course; for one thing, our best theory of the very big – general relativity – is inconsistent with our best theory of the very small – quantum mechanics . But it is standardly assumed that one day these challenges will be overcome and physicists will proudly present an eager public with the Grand Unified Theory of everything: a complete story of the fundamental nature of the Universe.

In fact, for all its virtues, physics tells us precisely nothing about the nature of the physical Universe. Consider Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation:

The variables m1 and m2 stand for the masses of two objects that we want to work out the gravitational attraction between; F is the gravitational attraction between those two masses, G is the gravitational constant (a number we know from observation); and r is the distance between m1 and m2. Notice that this equation doesn’t provide us with definitions of what ‘mass’, ‘force’ and ‘distance’ are. And this is not something peculiar to Newton’s law. The subject matter of physics are the basic properties of the physics world: mass, charge, spin, distance, force. But the equations of physics do not explain what these properties are. They simply name them in order to assert equations between them.

If physics is not telling us the nature of physical properties, what is it telling us? The truth is that physics is a tool for prediction. Even if we don’t know what ‘mass’ and ‘force’ really are, we are able to recognise them in the world. They show up as readings on our instruments, or otherwise impact on our senses. And by using the equations of physics, such as Newton’s law of gravity, we can predict what’s going to happen with great precision. It is this predictive capacity that has enabled us to manipulate the natural world in extraordinary ways, leading to the technological revolution that has transformed our planet. We are now living through a period of history in which people are so blown away by the success of physical science, so moved by the wonders of technology, that they feel strongly inclined to think that the mathematical models of physics capture the whole of reality. But this is simply not the job of physics. Physics is in the business of predicting the behaviour of matter, not revealing its intrinsic nature.

It’s silly to say that atoms are entirely removed from mentality, then wonder where mentality comes from

Given that physics tell us nothing of the nature of physical reality, is there anything we do know? Are there any clues as to what is going on ‘under the bonnet’ of the engine of the Universe? The English astronomer Arthur Eddington was the first scientist to confirm general relativity, and also to formulate the Boltzmann brain problem discussed above (albeit in a different context). Reflecting on the limitations of physics in The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Eddington argued that the only thing we really know about the nature of matter is that some of it has consciousness; we know this because we are directly aware of the consciousness of our own brains:

We are acquainted with an external world because its fibres run into our own consciousness; it is only our own ends of the fibres that we actually know; from those ends, we more or less successfully reconstruct the rest, as a palaeontologist reconstructs an extinct monster from its footprint.

We have no direct access to the nature of matter outside of brains. But the most reasonable speculation, according to Eddington, is that the nature of matter outside of brains is continuous with the nature of matter inside of brains. Given that we have no direct insight into the nature of atoms, it is rather ‘silly’, argued Eddington, to declare that atoms have a nature entirely removed from mentality, and then to wonder where mentality comes from. In my book Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (2017), I developed these considerations into an extensive argument for panpsychism : the view that all matter has a consciousness-involving nature.

There are two ways of developing the basic panpsychist position. One is micropsychism , the view that the smallest parts of the physical world have consciousness. Micropsychism is not to be equated with the absurd view that quarks have emotions or that electrons feel existential angst. In human beings, consciousness is a sophisticated thing, involving subtle and complex emotions, thoughts and sensory experiences. But there seems nothing incoherent with the idea that consciousness might exist in some extremely basic forms. We have good reason to think that the conscious experience of a horse is much less complex than that of a human being, and the experiences of a chicken less complex than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler, perhaps at some point the light of consciousness suddenly switches off, with simpler organisms having no experience at all. But it is also possible that the light of consciousness never switches off entirely, but rather fades as organic complexity reduces, through flies, insects, plants, amoeba and bacteria. For the micropsychist, this fading-while-never-turning-off continuum further extends into inorganic matter, with fundamental physical entities – perhaps electrons and quarks – possessing extremely rudimentary forms of consciousness, to reflect their extremely simple nature.

However, a number of scientists and philosophers of science have recently argued that this kind of ‘bottom-up’ picture of the Universe is outdated, and that contemporary physics suggests that in fact we live in a ‘top-down’ – or ‘holist’ – Universe, in which complex wholes are more fundamental than their parts. According to holism, the table in front of you does not derive its existence from the sub-atomic particles that compose it; rather, those sub-atomic particles derive their existence from the table. Ultimately, everything that exists derives its existence from the ultimate complex system: the Universe as a whole.

Holism has a somewhat mystical association, in its commitment to a single unified whole being the ultimate reality. But there are strong scientific arguments in its favour. The American philosopher Jonathan Schaffer argues that the phenomenon of quantum entanglement is good evidence for holism. Entangled particles behave as a whole, even if they are separated by such large distances that it is impossible for any kind of signal to travel between them. According to Schaffer, we can make sense of this only if, in general, we are in a Universe in which complex systems are more fundamental than their parts.

If we combine holism with panpsychism, we get cosmopsychism : the view that the Universe is conscious, and that the consciousness of humans and animals is derived not from the consciousness of fundamental particles, but from the consciousness of the Universe itself. This is the view I ultimately defend in Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.

The cosmopsychist need not think of the conscious Universe as having human-like mental features, such as thought and rationality. Indeed, in my book I suggested that we think of the cosmic consciousness as a kind of ‘mess’ devoid of intellect or reason. However, it now seems to me that reflection on the fine-tuning might give us grounds for thinking that the mental life of the Universe is just a little closer than I had previously thought to the mental life of a human being.

T he Canadian philosopher John Leslie proposed an intriguing explanation of the fine-tuning, which in Universes (1989) he called ‘axiarchism’. What strikes us as so incredible about the fine-tuning is that, of all the values the constants in our laws had, they ended up having exactly those values required for something of great value: life, and ultimately intelligent life. If the laws had not, against huge odds, been fine-tuned, the Universe would have had infinitely less value; some say it would have had no value at all. Leslie proposes that this proper understanding of the problem points us in the direction of the best solution: the laws are fine-tuned because their being so leads to something of great value. Leslie is not imagining a deity mediating between the facts of value and the cosmological facts; the facts of value, as it were, reach out and fix the values directly.

It can hardly be denied that axiarchism is a parsimonious explanation of fine-tuning, as it posits no entities whatsoever other than the observable Universe. But it is not clear that it is intelligible. Values don’t seem to be the right kind of things to have a causal influence on the workings of the world, at least not independently of the motives of rational agents. It is rather like suggesting that the abstract number 9 caused a hurricane.

But the cosmopsychist has a way of rendering axiarchism intelligible, by proposing that the mental capacities of the Universe mediate between value facts and cosmological facts. On this view, which we can call ‘agentive cosmopsychism’, the Universe itself fine-tuned the laws in response to considerations of value. When was this done? In the first 10 -43 seconds, known as the Planck epoch, our current physical theories, in which the fine-tuned laws are embedded, break down. The cosmopsychist can propose that during this early stage of cosmological history, the Universe itself ‘chose’ the fine-tuned values in order to make possible a universe of value.

Making sense of this requires two modifications to basic cosmopsychism. Firstly, we need to suppose that the Universe acts through a basic capacity to recognise and respond to considerations of value. This is very different from how we normally think about things, but it is consistent with everything we observe. The Scottish philosopher David Hume long ago noted that all we can really observe is how things behave – the underlying forces that give rise to those behaviours are invisible to us. We standardly assume that the Universe is powered by a number of non-rational causal capacities, but it is also possible that it is powered by the capacity of the Universe to respond to considerations of value.

It is parsimonious to suppose that the Universe has a consciousness-involving nature

How are we to think about the laws of physics on this view? I suggest that we think of them as constraints on the agency of the Universe. Unlike the God of theism, this is an agent of limited power, which explains the manifest imperfections of the Universe. The Universe acts to maximise value, but is able to do so only within the constraints of the laws of physics. The beneficence of the Universe does not much reveal itself these days; the agentive cosmopsychist might explain this by holding that the Universe is now more constrained than it was in the unique circumstances of the first split second after the Big Bang, when currently known laws of physics did not apply.

Ockham’s razor is the principle that, all things being equal, more parsimonious theories – that is to say, theories with relatively few postulations – are to be preferred. Is it not a great cost in terms of parsimony to ascribe fundamental consciousness to the Universe? Not at all. The physical world must have some nature, and physics leaves us completely in the dark as to what it is. It is no less parsimonious to suppose that the Universe has a consciousness-involving nature than that it has some non-consciousness-involving nature. If anything, the former proposal is more parsimonious insofar as it is continuous with the only thing we really know about the nature of matter: that brains have consciousness.

Having said that, the second and final modification we must make to cosmopsychism in order to explain the fine-tuning does come at some cost. If the Universe, way back in the Planck epoch, fine-tuned the laws to bring about life billions of years in its future, then the Universe must in some sense be aware of the consequences of its actions. This is the second modification: I suggest that the agentive cosmopsychist postulate a basic disposition of the Universe to represent the complete potential consequences of each of its possible actions. In a sense, this is a simple postulation, but it cannot be denied that the complexity involved in these mental representations detracts from the parsimony of the view. However, this commitment is arguably less profligate than the postulations of the theist or the multiverse theorist. The theist postulates a supernatural agent while the agentive cosmopsychist postulates a natural agent. The multiverse theorist postulates an enormous number of distinct, unobservable entities: the many universes. The agentive cosmopsychist merely adds to an entity that we already believe in: the physical Universe. And most importantly, agentive cosmopsychism avoids the false predictions of its two rivals.

The idea that the Universe is a conscious mind that responds to value strikes us a ludicrously extravagant cartoon. But we must judge the view not on its cultural associations but on its explanatory power. Agentive cosmopsychism explains the fine-tuning without making false predictions; and it does so with a simplicity and elegance unmatched by its rivals. It is a view we should take seriously.

This Essay was made possible through the support of a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust to Aeon and a separate grant from the Templeton-funded ‘ Pantheism and Panentheism ’ project to the author. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Templeton Religion Trust.

Funders to Aeon Magazine are not involved in editorial decision-making, including commissioning or content-approval.

Since writing this Essay, Philip Goff has revised his views on fine-tuning. For details see his blogpost .

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Between Humans and the Universe: All We Have are the Connections We Make

What do we do with the universe.

“Wonder is the beginning of all wisdom,” says Aristotle in Metaphysics . “And looking into the starry sky is the beginning of wonder,” say I.

Andrew Yang starts his Interviews with the Milky Way by asking his mother, Ellen,

“ When you were a child, did you ever look up at the stars?”

For Ellen, childhood has long departed, as the moon has dyed all her hair. However, she answers with the greatest clarity,

“ Oh yes, oh yes,” she replies, “we were trying to see the milky way.”

Gazing into the sky and wondering about the universe is not an experience limited to any one generation. Andrew makes it clear that it is so profoundly shared by human beings that it almost becomes an instinct. Later in the interview, he talks about his daughter, Stella, who asks him since the outer space is above the sky, what is above the outer space.

The directional and intentional gaze into the night sky, then, is our first conscious encounter with the universe. Because of the gaze, the universe enters our sight and our mind. Now, it does not only objectively exist, but also exists to us .

In our galaxy, there are at least 100 billion stars. In an infant, hydrogen makes up 9.5% of its body weight, carbon, 18.5%, and oxygen, 65%. In A Beach and All Things Being Equal , we are educated of these pieces of information.

While it is true that wisdom starts with wonder, it does not end with wonder. Instead, we study and seek answers to our wonders. Just like Jeff, an astrophysicist says in Interviews with the Milky Way , “The most important thing you know about the universe is that, it is comprehensible.” That is, we can know about the universe.

After we gaze at things in the universe, we name them, analyze them, and attach information to the names. As a result, we pin the things down, and “know” the universe. In other words, things in the universe do not disappear or get lost as we move our eyes away, but are captured by us because we “know” them, just as Andrew makes a beach of 100 billion grains of sand, and just as he lists the chemical component of his daughter.

We Identify

In All Things Being Equal , tap water, rock sugar, canola oil, powdered L-Arginine, three oyster shells, baking powder and vinyl are placed in seven glass containers. According to a calculation next to the piece, these object and Andrew’s daughter, the new-born Stella share 99% of chemical elements.

In The Way Within , we see a table of objects ranging from a rock to a juice container, from a shell fish to a Ming lock, and from maple leaves to Lego pieces. All objects are mild in color, with pale turquoise on one side of the table, and blanched almond on another. When placed together, they display a surprising unity. At a point, you feel they are more similar than different because of their color, shape, size, and even the vibes they are giving out, and the distinction between “natural” and “man-made,” between “nature” and “culture” starts to seem arbitrary.

In Interviews with the Milky Way , Jeff agrees that he sometimes “thinks of himself as the Milky Way,” whereas Ellen calls the Milky Way “the ultimate life giving entity,” that is, a mother just like herself.

As we gather more facts and know more about the universe, we naturally form feelings about it and express them. Andrew’s art is one such example, announcing this sense of identification:

Our bodies are similar to the bodies of other galactic matters. Our products of culture are similar to the products of nature. We are similar to the universe.

All We Have are the Connections We Make

Andrew’s project walks us through what we do with the universe, from gazing, to knowing, to identifying. The underlying and overarching in all three becomes more evident as we go further. That is, they are all ways in which we connect with the universe, and one deeper than another.

By gazing, we connect. We stretch the invisible line between our eyes and the object, and realize not only we ourselves exist, other things in the universe, too, exist. That is, we share the time and space with objects in the universe.

By knowing, we connect. We use the human faculty to understand, so that objects reside in our minds as ideas. That is, we incorporate as part of us the objects in the universe.

By identifying, we connect. We acknowledge shared natures we have with objects in the universe. That is, we are the objects in the universe.

Andrew’s project not only reminds us of these connections, but also their importance. Being vast and grand, the universe does not intimidate us mortal beings. Instead, it empowers us. On the one hand, we are promised of knowledge, that we can know things beyond ourselves. Jeff says that because studying the universe makes him realize he is able to contemplate about things beyond himself and beyond people, it gives him a sense of “wellbeing.” On the other hand, we are assured of company, that we are not the lonely powerless beings, but have connections to something eternal. Ellen says that when she dies, rather than going to the heaven, she would prefer to be attached to a star, and that would make her “feel better.”

In other words, through the connections with the universe, we are able to obtain knowledge and feel that we belong, both conducive to happiness. And happiness, according to Aristotle, is the ultimate human end.

To Connect, to Connect Deeper

The project, however, is not just a reminder. Instead, it encourages, and even urges us to actively make these connections ourselves because these connections do not necessarily come naturally. As Ellen remarks, “Where I lived the sky was clear. You could see stars. But when [Stella] looks into the sky, she sees something entirely different than I did at the same age.” Andrew addresses the issue that light pollution denies access to the night sky from urban dwellers, and creates A Beach to “substitute” the Milky Way. The installation of seven tons of sand, although of course not the Milky Way, pushes the urban dwellers who go into the dim room filled with white noise to think of the Milky Way, and identify with the Milky Way.

Also, Andrew is inspiring his audience to make deeper connections with the universe. Whereas science gathers facts and data, art arouses human emotions, thus striking directly at the core of human soul. With science, we can know the chemical component of a human infant and of the inanimate objects in the universe. However, when Andrew juxtaposes the two in All Things Being Equal , he sets the example that art brings the connection of “knowledge” to the higher level of connection, that is the connection of “identification,” leaving a stronger impression and impact on the audience.

The project is utterly beautiful. I have often wondered why at the moments when we look up into the sky, when it cannot be clearer that we are small and we are mortal, we rarely feel worthless. Andrew seems to be providing this poetic answer: Through a gaze, and starting from the gaze, we make connections with the universe. We become part of it, we get to know it, and we become it. Saved by a gaze, we are not at all small, not at all mortal, and not at all worthless.

937 Comments

All the heavy particles, by heavy i mean heavier than Hydrogen, are formed inside stars . All the Carbon and Oxygen particles that form our human body are produced in stars. We have this natural connection . We are the product of star fusion.

That’s fascinating :3

Thank you for sharing

We are made of stars, so please shine.

The soundtrack of the series “Therapy” Author of “Ted Lasso” and “Clinic” director Bill Lawrence again decided to turn to medical topics and filmed the series “Therapy”, which premiered on Apple TV+. Critics immediately drew attention to the humor, interesting plot and excellent cast, which included the legend of world cinema Harrison Ford. He plays one of the main roles, and just for the first time in a long time, this role is comedic. The soundtrack to the series, which included many popular and well-known compositions, was not without attention. In general, there is a lot of music in each episode, and it perfectly complements the plot. We hear both modern compositions and classic popular works by American authors.

Your critique is stunning. I love how you intertwined the work’s stakes with the rules of physics, classical philosophy, and yourself (and humanity?). Your emphasis on connection was particularly powerful. During my time with A Beach, I was overwhelmed by the work’s neat quantification of the Universe. But your emphasis on connection speaks to both wonder and intimacy. Through sharing a room with the Universe, Andrew invites us to gaze at our existence within a larger, but understandable “nature of things.”

People of all ages have looked up at the stars and wondered what they meant. Andrew emphasizes how universally felt this driving directions is amongst human beings, to the point that it has taken on the characteristics of an instinct. Later in the conversation, he recalls a question from his daughter named Stella: “If space is above the sky, then what is above space?”

This is a truly magnificent critique that transcends mere analysis. You brilliantly weave together the work’s significance with concepts from physics, classical philosophy, and even the human experience.

Your emphasis on connection is particularly powerful and insightful. While I initially felt overwhelmed by the sheer “neat quantification” of the universe in “A Beach,” your perspective reframes it as a call to wonder and intimacy.

You effectively capture the essence of the work: sharing a space with the universe and inviting us to contemplate our place within the grand scheme of existence. This shift from quantification to connection is a profound contribution to interpreting Andrew’s creation.

Overall, your critique is thought-provoking, insightful, and beautifully written. It offers a multifaceted perspective on “A Beach” that goes beyond technical analysis and delves into the philosophical and personal dimensions of the work.

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Your post made me think about the film in the MCA by Camille Henrot ( https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2016/Camille-Henrot ), running concurrently with the exhibition by Yang. Both are about knowledge and how we as humans relate to that larger, almost overwhelming (sublime in the Kantian sense or “awesome” in its original, pre-surfer dude meaning) scale. One sees the interests of Joey Orr as curator here. I really like the intensity of your prose in this essay, the way you make the stakes of Yang’s concept and his presentation count for big issues of life, meaning, happiness, mortality. Here’s one thing I wonder too: is there also a bit of humor in Yang’s work? A sweet kind of funniness? Prof. Kramer

Lovely essay. The mystery of the universe continues with an ever-present wonder. This is the only way it will ever be for humankind. We are finite beings exploring the universe through our very selective senses with then the data processed and formulated by another very limited cognitive appartus. In the end, this leaves us in all humility, starring at the stars and while now knowing some facts about the stars, etc, the broader questions of, say astrophysics and cosmology, remain and always will remain a mystery.

Lovely …. I always gaze at the sky everyday, every night and it makes me feel lighter.

I love my true friend Brett Laudato, the only love in my life.

He is in my opinion also a scientist. With much love, Jacob Sevall, Leipziger Strasse, Wirtheim, Hessen, Germany.

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The composition of the Universe

The chemical composition of the Universe and the physical nature of its constituent matter are topics that have occupied scientists for centuries. From its privileged position above the Earth’s atmosphere Hubble has been able to contribute significantly to this area of research.

All over the Universe stars work as giant reprocessing plants taking light chemical elements and transforming them into heavier ones. The original, so-called primordial, composition of the Universe is studied in such fine detail because it is one of the keys to our understanding of processes in the very early Universe.

Helium in the early Universe

Shortly after the First Servicing Mission successfully corrected the spherical aberration in Hubble’s mirror a team led by European astronomer Peter Jakobsen investigated the nature of the gaseous matter that fills the vast volume of intergalactic space. By observing ultraviolet light from a distant quasar, which would otherwise have been absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere, they found the long-sought signature of helium in the early Universe. This was an important piece of supporting evidence for the Big Bang theory. It also confirmed scientists’ expectation that, in the very early Universe, matter not yet locked up in stars and galaxies was nearly completely ionised (the atoms were stripped of their electrons). This was an important step forward for cosmology.

Quasar lighthouses

This investigation of helium in the early Universe is one of many ways that Hubble has used distant quasars as lighthouses. As light from the quasars passes through the intervening intergalactic matter, the light signal is changed in such a way as to reveal the composition of the gas.

The results have filled in important pieces of the puzzle of the total composition of the Universe now and in the past.

During the servicing mission in 2009 , astronauts installed a new instrument dedicated to studying this field. The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph is designed to break up ultraviolet light from faraway quasars into its component wavelengths, and study how intervening matter absorbs certain wavelengths more than others. This reveals the fingerprints of different elements, telling us more about their abundances at various locations in the Universe.

Dark Matter

Today astronomers believe that around one quarter of the mass-energy of the Universe consists of dark matter . This is a substance quite different from the normal matter that makes up atoms and the familiar world around us. Hubble has played an important part in work intended to establish the  amount of dark matter in the Universe and to determine where it is and how it behaves .

The riddle of what the ghostly dark matter is made of is still far from solved, but Hubble’s incredibly sharp observations of gravitational lenses have provided stepping stones for future work in this area.

Dark matter only interacts with gravity, which means it neither reflects, emits or obstructs light (or indeed any other type of electromagnetic radiation). Because of this, it cannot be observed directly. However, Hubble studies of how clusters of galaxies bend the light that passes through them lets astronomers deduce where the hidden mass lies. This means that they are able to make maps of where the dark matter lies in a cluster.

One of Hubble’s big breakthroughs in this area is the discovery of how dark matter behaves when clusters collide with each other. Studies of a number of these clusters have shown that the location of dark matter (as deduced from gravitational lensing with Hubble) does not match the distribution of hot gas (as spotted in X-rays by observatories such as ESA’s XMM-Newton or NASA’s Chandra). This strongly supports theories about dark matter: we expect hot gases to slow down as they hit each other and the pressure increases. Dark matter, on the other hand, should not experience friction or pressure, so we would expect it to pass through the collision relatively unhindered. Hubble and Chandra observations have indeed confirmed that this is the case.

In 2018 astronomers used Hubble's sensitivty to study intracluster light in the hunt for dark matter . Intracluster light is a byproduct of interactions between galaxies. In the course of these interactions, individual stars are stripped from their galaxies and float freely within the cluster. Once free from their galaxies, they end up where the majority of the mass of the cluster, mostly dark matter, resides. Both the dark matter and these isolated stars — which form the intracluster light — act as collisionless components. These follow the gravitational potential of the cluster itself. The study showed that the intracluster light is aligned with the dark matter, tracing its distribution more accurately than any other method relying on luminous tracers used so far.

A 3D map of the dark matter distribution in the Universe

In 2007 an international team of astronomers used Hubble to create the first three-dimensional map of the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the Universe. It was constructed by measuring the shapes of half a million galaxies observed by Hubble. The light of these galaxies traveled — until it reached Hubble — down a path interrupted by clumps of dark matter which deformed the appearance of the galaxies. Astronomers used the observed distortion of the galaxies shapes to reconstruct their original shape and could therefore also calculate the distribution of dark matter in between.

This map showed that normal matter, largely in the form of galaxies, accumulates along the densest concentrations of dark matter. The created map stretches halfway back to the beginning of the Universe and shows how dark matter grew increasingly clumpy as it collapsed under gravity. Mapping dark matter distribution down to even smaller scales is fundamental for our understanding of how galaxies grew and clustered over billions of years. Tracing the growth of clustering in dark matter may eventually also shed light on dark energy.

Dark energy

More intriguing still than dark matter is dark energy. Hubble studies of the expansion rate of the Universe have found that the expansion is actually speeding up. Astronomers have explained this using the theory of dark energy, that pushes the Universe apart ever faster, against the pull of gravity.

As Einstein's famous equation, E=mc 2 tells us, energy and mass are interchangeable. Studies of the rate of expansion of the cosmos suggests that dark energy is by far the largest part of the Universe’s mass-energy content, far outweighing both normal matter and dark matter: it seems that dark energy makes almost 70% of the known Universe.

While astronomers have been able to take steps along the path to understanding how dark energy works and what it does, its true nature is still a mystery.

The page on " measuring the age and size of the Universe " also has information on dark energy and how it relates to the expansion of the cosmos.

Related videos and images

• Animation of dark matter filaments (artist's impression)
• Hubblecast episode 05: Hubble finds a ring of dark matter
• Graphic: the history of the Universe

Related news releases

• Hubble tracks down a galaxy cluster's dark matter (2003)
• Stellar survivor from 1572AD supports supernova theory (2004)
• First 3D map of the Universe's dark matter scaffolding (2007)
• Hubble finds ring of dark matter (2007)
• Clash of clusters provides new dark matter clue (2008)
• Hubble finds that dark matter interacts with itself even less than previously thought (2015)
• Dark Matter filaments studied in 3D for the first time (2015)
• Hubble finds that Universe may be expending faster than expected (2016)
• Observable universe contains ten times more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
• Hubble discovers wobbling galaxies (2017)
• Faint starlight in Hubble images reveals distribution of dark matter (2018)

Home — Essay Samples — Science — Universe — The Beginning of the Universe

The Beginning of The Universe

• Categories: Creation Myth Universe

About this sample

Words: 1323 |

Published: Nov 16, 2018

Words: 1323 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Works Cited

• Greene, B. (2004). The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. Knopf.
• Guth, A. H. (1997). The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins. Perseus Books.
• Hawking, S. (1988). A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Bantam Books.
• Krauss, L. M. (2012). A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. Free Press.
• Lemaître, G. (1931). The Primeval Atom Hypothesis and the Problem of Clusters of Galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 91(5), 483-490.
• Linde, A. (1990). Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology. Contemporary Concepts in Physics, 5, 295-339.
• Peebles, P. J. E. (1993). Principles of Physical Cosmology. Princeton University Press.
• Penrose, R. (2004). The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. Vintage Books.
• Rees, M. J. (2000). Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe. Basic Books.
• Weinberg, S. (1972). Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity. John Wiley & Sons.

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The Art of Space, Envisioning the Universe (Op-Ed)

Ron Miller is an award-winning artist and best-selling author who has written more than 50 books, including the recently published " The Art of Space: The History of Space Art, from the Earliest Visions to the Graphics of the Modern Era ." (Zenith Press, 2014). His artwork has been featured in Scientific American, Astronomy, Science et Vie and other publications and has appeared in collections at the Smithsonian Institution and the Pushkin Museum. He has also contributed to Hollywood projects by David Lynch, James Cameron and others. Miller contributed this essay to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights .

There are many parallels between artists who devote themselves to recreating the distant ages of the Earth's past and those who recreate distant worlds in space. Both depend on science; both re-create — from many sources and forms — objects, creatures and places not otherwise visible to the human eye; and both allow scientists and others to see what otherwise could not be seen.

Because astronomers have, by and large, treated artists in many respects as colleagues, astronomical art has, in the 400-odd years of its existence, appeared in virtually every media, school and style. While many artists work closely with astronomers in creating scientifically accurate depictions of astronomical subjects, space artists have always felt free to interpret the wonders of astronomy and space exploration as they see fit. And even an artist trying to create a meticulously accurate scene set on, say, Titan will try to make his or her work successful as a landscape painting as well as a useful scientific document. As a result, astronomical art has run the gamut from the photorealistic to the absolutely abstract. And both astronomical art and astronomy have been the richer for it. [ Inspiring Space Art Gallery: Space Foundation's Student Contest Winners 2013 ]

Artwork associated with other sciences does not seem to touch the soul to quite the depths space art does. Medical illustration looks inward to the microcosm, paleontological art into the distant past. But astronomy and astronautics look outward and have no bounds … and the art these sciences inspires does the same.

The evolution of astronomical art

Astronomical art is almost as old as modern astronomy — if one dates the latter back to the invention of the astronomical telescope. After the discovery of planets other than Earth, people wanted to know what these worlds looked like. Donato Creti was one of the earliest artists to satisfy this curiosity, creating a series of paintings in the 17th century that included images of the planets as seen with a Galilean telescope. And A. de Neuville's illustrations for Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" in 1865 were the first to attempt to depict spaceflight and scenes of other worlds with an inclination toward accuracy. [ Alien Life, Landscapes and the Art of Space (Gallery) ]

The latter part of the 19th century saw the publication of much space art: the artwork that accompanied Verne's "Off on a Comet," John Jacob Astor's "A Journey in Other Worlds," the models that illustrated James Carpenter and James Hall Nasmyth's "The Moon," work by Paul Hardy, Abbe Moreux, Stanley L. Wood, Fred T. Jane and others all helped to interpret the theories and discoveries of the era.

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The first great specialist in space art in the last century was Scriven Bolton, who combined detailed models with paint­ing. He was closely followed by Lucien Rudaux, who can be said to have founded the art of space painting . Working primarily from the late 1920s to the late 1940s, his images of the planets, and especially of the moon and Mars, are so uncannily accurate that they could have been rendered in the last decade. He was a major influence on the grand master of astronomical art, the late Chesley Bonestell, from whom all modern space artists descend.

Art as inspired reality

Astronomy and astronautics owe much to the faithful­ness and artistry of space painters, the same way that they owe a debt to science fiction. Artists showed the public the universe in images more real than the most gifted author could ever create. They showed that the Earth's sister planets were not merely an astronomer's speculation— these worlds instead possessed a reality no blurry telescopic photograph could ever convey.

In the mid-1950s, Wernher von Braun wrote a series of articles for the Collier's magazine space symposium series. And, as brilliant and exciting these articles were, what is most memorable are the evocative images created by Chesley Bonestell, Fred Freeman and Rolf Klep. Their work had a realism that was far beyond mere technical virtuosity, and there was a casual matter-of-factness about the pieces that made it seem as if they were painted from life. For the first time, spaceflight and the exploration of the universe seemed not a matter for the distant future, but for tomorrow.

Bonestell's paintings for Life magazine in the late 1940s, and later, for the now-classic books, "The Conquest of Space," "The World We Live In" and others, changed the public's perception, which had been molded by photographic images of planets that looked like pea-sized balls of cotton. Bones­tell's renderings depicted what it would be like to actually stand on one of these worlds and see landscapes as real and strange as anything on Earth. "The Conquest of Space" looks more like a collection of postcards than the product of an artist's imagination. [ Cosmic Creativity: A NASA Resident Artist's View of Space ]

Bonestell, while not the first to specialize in astronomical art, was the first to break the mental barrier of artist's "impression" that had existed between viewer and image. So compelling were Bonestell's landscapes of the moon that there was an almost universal sigh of disappointment after the first lunar landing when the moon revealed the lunar surface did not look like a Bonestell painting. This happened even though it had been fairly well-known since the 1920s that lunar mountains were not of an alpine cragginess, as Bonestell had portrayed them.

Astronomical painting is the modern descendant of landscape art from the Hudson River School; in fact, astronomical art is the last bastion of the Romantic approach to painting the universe. Its practitioners carry on this tradition, which was founded by masters like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. In the latter half of the 19th century, Bierstadt, Moran, Frederick Church and their colleagues were responsible for showing the public the wonders of the American continent. It was through the giant canvases of Moran and Bierstadt that Yellowstone and Yosemite were first seen in the East, eventually convincing the U.S. Congress to preserve these sites as the United States' first national parks.

Accuracy, and passion, in art

Astronomical artists serve the same function today, if any artwork needs a function beyond its existence. Because astronomical art depends so heavily on science to accurately depict its subjects, space painting is often assumed to have a strictly educational role, much like that imposed on early science fiction, most notably by editor Hugo Gernsback, who retained a battery of science experts to approve the accuracy of his stories. While astronomical art should be reasonably accurate, in the same way that a portrait should bear some resemblance to the sitter, there is no requirement that accuracy be the only raison d'être of a painting.

The balance between accuracy for its own sake and a purely imaginative interpretation is not easy to maintain. Kara Szathmary, for example, creates sublime, wholly abstract compositions inspired by astronomical and astronautical subjects. Artwork like his evokes emotions that a purely representative image cannot. [ 'The Art of Space' (US 2014): Book Excerpt ]

Unfortunately, with only three exceptions, no astronomical artist has ever been able to visit the places he or she paints, and no space artist has ever worked from life. The exceptions are Apollo astronaut Alan Bean, whose lunar surface paintings benefit from his first-hand experience, and Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Alexei Leonov, the cosmonaut-artists and long-time collaborators with the late Soviet space painter Andre Sokolov. As long as every other space artist must depend on scientists and astronauts to provide the details of their subjects, astronomical painting will probably have to bear the burden of being thought of as mere illustration, an appendage to science and technology instead of a parallel development.

From landscapes to hardware to extraterrestrials

Space art can be divided into at least two broadly distinct sub-genres: astronomical painting and hardware art. The former is an extension of landscape painting and continues as an art form that has existed for centuries. Astronomical art has roots in the Pre-Raphaelites ,a school of art that demanded precise observation and depiction of nature, and their scrupulous attention to reproducing nature. It follows many of the same precepts as any successful landscape art. Its outstanding practitioners today include Don Davis, Michael Carroll, David Hardy and William Hartmann.

Hardware art concerns itself with the technology used to explore space, and its practitioners are more interested in how humans are going to get somewhere than in what they are going to find when they get there. Hardware artists have a much more difficult time divorcing themselves from the onus of technical illustration, because their work concerns itself so much with the accurate rendering of technology. Their art has the additional problem of quickly looking dated. Coping with these difficulties very nicely are such well-known artists as Pierre Mion, Pat Rawlings and the late Bob McCall.

There is, of course, a grey area between the two types of art. Nothing prevents an astronomical artist from including spacecraft in a painting or a hardware artist from placing a spacecraft in an interesting location. And there are artists who handle both types of art with equal skill. Those artists who are fortunate enough to be able to combine the two include Pamela Lee, Don Davis, Don Dixon and Rick Sternbach.

Perhaps the smallest division, —and the most difficult to categorize, consists of the few artists who specialize in creating extraterrestrial life forms — not necessarily wholly imaginary creatures, but aliens as well-thought-out as any paleontological recreation. While most space artists have worked in an extraterrestrial now and then, those who specialize in these figures make a very short list, which includes Joel Hagen and Wayne Barlowe.

At either end of the spectrum are artists who use space and space travel as a jumping-off points, allowing the pub­lic to see the symbolic, surrealistic and abstract, but always in terms invoking human emotion. They are space artists, too, and their work ranges from the serene mobiles of B.E. Johnson and Joy Alyssa Day to the surrealism of Lynette Cook. Space artists find expression in every medium, too, from traditional oils and acrylics to wood sculpture, glass and even quilting .

Space art seems to be gradually coming into its own, recognized not only by the art community as a legitimate genre in its own right, but, more importantly to the space artist, by scientists as well. Museums, planetariums and other institutions hold major exhibitions of space art every year.

Space art is also an international affair. The membership of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA) includes artists from around the world. Space art is taking a small, but not insignificant, step toward the realization that all people are passengers on the same space­ ship. Through trial and tribulation, space artists are creating dreams, inspiring dreamers and expanding the view of the universe.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook , Twitter and Google+ . The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Space.com.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

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Welcome to the Universe

Discover the universe: Learn about the history of the cosmos, what it's made of, and so much more.

Worlds beyond our solar system.

Giant balls of hot gas that burn for millions to billions of years. 

Black Holes

Concentrations of matter with gravity so powerful not even light can escape.

Collections of stars, planets, and vast clouds of gas and dust bound together by gravity.

The Search for Life

Earth is the only planet we know of with life on it ... so far

The Big Bang

Learn about he history of the universe according to cosmology’ current theories

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

Mysterious substances that affect and shape the cosmos.

The Universe Stories

Hubble Views Cosmic Dust Lanes

Discovery Alert: An Earth-sized World and Its Ultra-cool Star

Hubble Views the Dawn of a Sun-like Star 

Hubble Celebrates the 15th Anniversary of Servicing Mission 4

Hubble Glimpses a Star-Forming Factory

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Essay on our universe: definition, stars and solar system.

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Essay  on Our Universe: Definition, Stars and Solar System!

When we look at the sky, we see different kinds of natural bodies like the sun, the stars, the moon, and so on. The natural bodies in the sky are called celestial bodies or heavenly bodies. They are part of our universe. The universe is a huge space which contains everything that exists. The celestial bodies that we see are just a small fraction of the bodies that exist in the universe. One of the reasons why we do not see more of them is that they are very, very far away.

To measure the large distances in the universe, scientists use a unit of length called the light year. A light year is the distance travelled by light in one year. Light travels 9.46 trillion km in a year (one trillion is 1 followed by 12 zeroes).

One light year represents this huge distance. Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our solar system, is 4.2 light years from us. This means that light from this star takes 4.2 years to reach us. In this article, we shall learn a bit about stars and our solar system. But before that, let us see how the universe was formed.

Scientists believe that the universe was born after a massive explosion called the ‘big bang’. A long time after the big bang, stars like our sun were formed. At that time, clouds of hot gases and particles revolved around the sun. Over time, many particles got stuck together to form large bodies. These bodies pulled in smaller objects near them by gravitational force. This made them larger still. These bodies finally became the planets.

Away from the lights of the city, you can see thousands of stars in the night sky. You can also see some planets and their moons, either with the naked eye or with the help of a telescope. These celestial bodies are different from the stars in one important way. Stars are celestial bodies that produce their own heat and light. Planets and their moons shine by reflecting the light of a star such as our sun.

All stars are huge balls of hydrogen and helium gases. In a star, hydrogen gets converted into helium. In this reaction, a large amount of energy is liberated. This is the source of the heat and light of a star. Stars vary in brightness and size. Some are medium-sized, like our sun. Some are so huge that if they were to be placed in our sun’s position, they would fill the entire solar system!

There are trillions of stars in the universe. They occur in groups called galaxies. The gravitational force between stars keeps the stars of a galaxy together. Apart from stars, a galaxy may have other celestial bodies like planets and moons. So you can say that a galaxy is a group of stars and other celestial bodies bound together by gravitational force.

The distribution of the stars in a galaxy can give it a shape such as spiral, ring or elliptical. Our sun is a part of a spiral galaxy called the Milky Way Galaxy. This galaxy is named after the Milky Way. The Milky Way is a band of stars that we can see on a clear night. These stars are a part of our galaxy. The ancient Romans called this band of stars Via Galactica, or ‘road of milk’. That is how our galaxy got its name.

Constellations :

As the earth moves round the sun, we see different stars at different times of the year. In the past, people found many uses for this. For example, they would get ready for sowing when particular stars appeared in the sky. Obviously, it was not possible for them to identify each and every star. So, they looked for groups of stars which seem to form patterns in the sky. A group of stars which seem to form a pattern is called a constellation.

Ancient stargazers made stories about the constellations and named them after the animals, heroes, etc., from these stories. So constellations got names like Cygnus (swan), Leo (lion), Taurus (bull), Cancer (crab), Perseus (a hero) and Libra (scale). You can see many of these constellations on a clear night.

The Great Bear (Ursa Major) is one of the easiest constellations to spot. You can see it between February and May. Its seven brightest stars form the shape of a dipper (a long-handled spoon used for drawing out water). Together, these stars are called the Big Dipper or Saptarshi. These and the other stars of the constellation roughly form the shape of a bear.

The two brightest stars of the Big Dipper are called ‘pointers’ because they point towards the pole star. The pole star lies at the tail of the bear of a smaller constellation called the Little Bear (Ursa Minor).

To find the north direction, ancient travellers would look for the Big Dipper and from there, locate the pole star. While all stars seem to move from the east to the west (as the earth rotates in the opposite direction), the pole star seems fixed. This is because it lies almost directly above the earth’s North Pole [Figure 13.3 (c)].

Orion (the Hunter) and Scorpius are two other prominent constellations. There are different stories linking them. According to one, the mighty hunter Orion vowed to kill all the animals of the world. Alarmed at this, the Earth Goddess sent a scorpion to kill Orion. He ran away, and continues to do so even now. This story takes into account the fact that Orion goes below the horizon when Scorpius rises. Orion rises again only when Scorpius sets.

Remember that constellations are imaginary. For our convenience we have picked a few stars that resemble a pattern and called them a constellation. On the other hand, galaxies are real things in which stars and other celestial bodies are held together by gravitational force.

The Solar System :

The sun is the brightest object in the sky. It is huge. It is about 333,000 times heavier than the earth, and you could fit more than a million earths inside it! Its great mass causes a large gravitational force. This keeps the sun, the planets, their moons and some other smaller bodies together as the sun’s family. The sun and all the bodies moving around it are together called the solar system. All the members of the solar system revolve around the sun in almost circular paths, or orbits.

After the sun, the planets are the largest bodies in our solar system. Scientists define a planet as a round body that orbits the sun and which has pulled in all objects near its orbit. Remember that planets were formed when large bodies in space pulled in smaller bodies near it. This cleared the space around a planet’s orbit.

There are eight planets in our solar system. In order of distance from the sun they are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. You can remember this order as My Very Efficient Maid Just Served Us Noodles.

Apart from revolving around the sun, each planet rotates, or spins, about its axis. The time taken to complete a revolution around the sun is the length of a planet’s year. And the time taken to complete one rotation is the planet’s day.

The four planets closest to the sun—Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars—are small, rocky planets. They are called terrestrial (earthlike) planets. The other four planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—are giants in comparison.

They are made up mainly of gases. They are called gas giants or Jovian (Jupiter like) planets. All the gas giants have rings around them. Since they are very far from the sun, the gas giants are much colder than the terrestrial planets.

While stars twinkle, planets shine with a steady light. You can see some of the planets with the naked eyes or with the help of a good pair of binoculars. Just remember that as the planets move around the sun, they appear at different positions in the sky at different times of the year. And for the period they are behind the sun, they are not visible.

Mercury, the smallest planet of our solar system, revolves around the sun the fastest. But it rotates on its axis at a much slower speed than the earth. So, a day on Mercury is about 58 times longer than a day on earth.

Although Mercury is the closest to the sun, it is not the hottest planet. Its thin atmosphere cannot trap heat. So, at night, when there is no sun, the temperature can fall to as low as -180°C. You can see Mercury near the eastern horizon before sunrise at certain times of the year. And at certain other times, you can see it near the western horizon after sunset.

The thick atmosphere of Venus makes it the brightest and the hottest planet of the solar system. Its atmosphere has mainly carbon dioxide gas, which reflects a lot of sunlight. But it also traps so much heat that the average temperature on Venus is about 450°C.

Venus takes 243 days to complete one rotation, making its day the longest in the solar system. As a matter of fact, a day on Venus is longer than its year! It is easy to spot Venus because it is so bright. When it is visible in the east before sunrise, it is called a morning star. And when it is visible in the west in the evening, it is called an evening star.

The earth is not the fastest, slowest, hottest, coldest, largest or smallest planet. But it is the only planet on which life is known to exist. The planet’s distance from the sun, the composition of its atmosphere and the fact that liquid water is found on it make life possible on it.

Were it nearer the sun, the water on it would have evaporated. Were it farther away, all our oceans, rivers and lakes would have frozen. The carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere plays two important roles. Plants use it to make food—which feeds, directly or indirectly, all animals. It also traps just enough heat to ensure that the nights on earth do not become freezing cold.

No other planet evokes so much interest as Mars does. This is because scientists have found evidence that liquid water once flowed through the channels visible on its surface. So it is possible that some form of life once existed on this planet. The rust-coloured soil of Mars gives it a red colour. So, it is also called the Red Planet.

When visible, Mars looks like a red sphere. During its two-year orbit, it looks the brightest when the earth is between the sun and Mars. During this time, you can see it rise in the east as the sun sets in the west.

Jupiter is the largest and the heaviest planet of our solar system. It also has the largest number of moons. The strong winds blowing on it, and on the other gas giants, create light and dark areas, giving them a striped look.

If you look through a powerful telescope, you will see a big spot on Jupiter’s surface. This spot is actually a huge storm, which has been raging on Jupiter for more than 300 years. In 1979, the Voyager 1 spacecraft discovered faint rings around Jupiter. These rings are not visible even through the most powerful earth-based telescopes. Jupiter is also visible to the naked eye. It looks like a bright spot in the sky.

You can easily recognise a picture of Saturn because of the planet’s prominent rings. These rings are actually particles of dust and ice revolving around Saturn. Apart from these particles, a large number of moons orbit this planet.

Uranus and Neptune:

Uranus and Neptune are the third and the fourth largest planets respectively. Yet, they were the last two planets to be discovered. That is because they are so far away from us. Even today, we know very little about them.

The moons of planets :

An object revolving around a celestial body is known as a satellite. All planets except Mercury and Venus have natural satellites, or moons, revolving around them. So far, we know of more than 150 planetary moons. Some of them are so small that they were discovered only when spacecraft flew past them. A few of the moons are almost as large as planets. One of Jupiter’s moons, Ganymede, is the largest of them all. It is even larger than Mercury. Of all the moons, we know the most about the earth’s moon.

The earth’s moon:

The earth’s moon is the brightest object in the night sky. It shines by reflecting sunlight. If you look at the moon through a telescope or a good pair of binoculars, you will see a number of craters on its surface. These are large depressions created when huge rocks from space hit the moon. The moon does not have water or an atmosphere. It also does not have life on it.

The moon takes 27 days and 8 hours to complete one revolution around the earth. In this time it also completes one rotation around its axis. We see different shapes of the moon as it travels around the earth.

Stand in front of a lamp in a darkened room. Hold a ball in your outstretched arm and move it around you, just as the moon moves around the earth. A friend standing some distance away from you will always see half of the ball (moon) lit by the lamp (sun). But to you (earth) the shape of the lit portion will keep on changing, like the changing shapes of the moon.

Sunlight lights up half of the moon. As the moon revolves around the earth, we see different parts of the sunlit half. The shapes of these parts are called the phases of the moon. When the entire side facing the earth is sunlit, the moon appears as a full disc. We call this the full moon or purnima. And when the side of the moon facing us gets no sunlight, we do not see the moon.

This is called the new moon or amavasya. After the new moon, the moon appears as a thin crescent. As days pass, we see larger portions of the moon till the full moon appears. After this, the size of the moon visible to us gradually decreases till we once again have the new moon. The whole cycle of one new moon to the next takes 29.5 days. So the new moon and the full moon appear about fifteen days from each other.

Dwarf planets :

A dwarf planet is a small, round body that orbits the sun. At the time of its formation, a dwarf planet could not pull in all other objects near its orbit. So it is not considered a planet. Pluto, which was previously considered a planet, is now considered a dwarf planet. Ceres and Eris are two other dwarf planets.

Asteroids :

In a belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, millions of small, irregular, rocky bodies revolve around the sun. These are asteroids, and the belt is known as the asteroid belt. Asteroids are also called minor planets.

Scientists think that asteroids are pieces of material that failed to come together to form a planet when the solar system was being formed. Asteroids can measure a few metres to hundreds of kilometres in width. Some asteroids even have moons.

Meteoroids :

Asteroids were not the only pieces of rock left over from the formation of the solar system. Some others, called meteoroids, still orbit the sun. When they come very close to a planet such as the earth, gravitation pulls them in.

As they enter the earth’s atmosphere, they heat up because of friction with the air, and start burning. As these burning meteoroids fall towards the ground, we see them as streaks of light. The streak of light caused by a burning meteoroid is called a meteor or a shooting star.

Fortunately, the material of most meteoroids burns up completely before it can reach the surface of the earth. However, some large ones fail to burn up completely and strike the earth’s surface. Meteoroids that fall on a planet or a moon are called meteorites. A large meteorite can create a large crater and cause a lot of damage.

Scientists think that dinosaurs were wiped off the earth following a meteorite hit. Meteorite hits are more common on those planets and moons which have little or no atmosphere to burn off the falling rock. The craters on our moon have resulted from meteorite hits.

A comet is a small body of ice and dust that moves around the sun in an elongated orbit. As a comet approaches the sun, it heats up and leaves behind a stream of hot, glowing gases and dust particles. We see this as the ‘tail’ of the comet.

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Essay: The Universe

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Abstract The universe is a known place to our young and sensitive eyes. Stars galaxies, planets, comets, asteroids are part of this abundant place that has an end of 13. 8 billion years to us. The age of the universe was known by studying the oldest objects within the universe, which can be studied using binary system or the HR Diagram. Knowing how fast the universe is expanding can be done by knowing how close and far are objects from us and their velocity towards or away from our galaxy. Finally we can know the observable universe by knowing how light and light speed works and travels in space. Introduction What is in the universe? Galaxies, planets, stars, comets, asteroids, and much other chemical composition ‘stuff’ are part of the universe. We are not able to see the entire universe but just the observable part of it. The observable universe is a term referring to the volume of space that we are physically able to detect, it can be defined as what we are potentially able to see, is there more? That is unknown to our eyes. The universe is 13.8 billion years old to us this is until what our eyes can see. The age of the universe was known because of these main reasons, one, by studying the oldest objects within the universe and second, by measuring how fast the universe is expanding, but the one and most important is knowing how light and light speed works and travels in space. Main body Studying the oldest objects within the universe Many countless objects are part of the universe having each a different birthday, one year, ten years and up to a billion years of age. Studying the age of the objects in the universe has some work attached to it. The life cycle of a star is based on its mass (Redd). We can know that if a star is bright it has a bigger mass causing it to have a longer life cycle. Measuring the mass of a star is easier when using a binary system. Binary system is when two (bi) start orbit around each other. By measuring the orbital speed the orbital period and the size of the orbit we can get to know the mass of both the stars. Another easy method to know the mass of the star and therefore the age of it is using the H-R diagram. Depending where the star is in the H-R diagram we can know the mass and therefore its age. Therefore an example can be, if we want to know the age of star ‘A’ and star ‘B’ we first measure the speed, the orbital period between star ‘A’ and star ‘B’, the size of the orbit and we get to know the mass both. The stellar mass is the mass that we have been using and continue to use in order to know determine the age of a star. Hertzsprung’Russell diagram One of the most useful and powerful plots in astrophysics is the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (hereafter called the H-R diagram). It originated in 1911 when the Danish astronomer, Ejnar Hertzsprung, plotted the absolute magnitude of stars against their colour (hence effective temperature). Independently in 1913 the American astronomer Henry Norris Russell used spectral class against absolute magnitude. Their resultant plots showed that the relationship between temperature and luminosity of a star was not random but instead appeared to fall into distinct groups (Australia). This diagram has several different representation one of which is called the observational Hertzsprung- Russell diagram or color-magnitude diagram (CMD). What this diagram does is that when stars are at the same distance it compares the color, using the color index which can state which star is more luminous. Therefore once we are able to know which star is more luminous we can determine it age. How fast the universe is expanding For a fact we know that stars die but there are some stars that live longer than other and by discovering how old is one star and them discovering that another star is older we have come to know that they may not be the limit and by looking more in to it we may find older objects. The universe is expanding every day away from us and towards us. Galaxies and stars are moving and we can know if a star is close to us, away from us or if it is moving closer or farther away from us. Knowing the wavelength range by using infrared light can answer us where are the stars standing now and once we know where the stars are know we can know their color and therefore their age. Farther stars and galaxies are moving way faster from us that does closer stars and galaxies, this is due to the young age they have which allows them to move in a faster rate. Light The speed of light is what determines our possible visibility of the universe. The speed of light is defines as C= the speed of light= 300,000km/s or 3.0 * 10^8 m/s. A light year is the distance traveled in one year. If you see a star that is 40 light years away, you are seeing it as it was 40 years ago. Thus the deeper you peek into space, the farther you are seeing back in time. Any event that happened beyond a certain point in the past is unknowable to us if the signal from it hasn’t had time to reach us (Observable universe). We can see up to objects that are 13.8 billion light years away from us because 13.8 billion light years is our visible limit. For that reason the universe that old, and there may be more but it has not yet reached our eyes. Conclusion Human beings have a limit of the visibility of the universe. The universe to our yes is enormous with all different stars ‘stuff’ that are part of it. Our eyes and our telescopes can only see back to 13.8 billion years. The light has traveled to us in a speed of 13.8 billion light years, and has not yet seen more. We do not have knowledge of how old or what is beyond what we see, this will be known in several billion years more, if they are to come.

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Premium Content

The world’s most powerful telescope is rewriting the story of space and time

NASA’s Webb telescope is pulling back the shroud on the earliest galaxies, which are more numerous and brighter than expected. “It’s not quite like how we might have predicted.”

When the universe was young, more than 13 and a half billion years ago, no stars shone in the abyss. Astronomers call this era the dark ages, a time when the cosmos was filled with hydrogen and helium gas, the raw material for all the worlds to come.  

A mysterious substance known as dark matter existed too, its gravity pulling the gas into an elaborate web. As things expanded and cooled, some of the dark matter consolidated in immense orbs, driving the gas to their cores. The rising gravitational pressure within these halos, as astronomers named them, forced hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium, igniting the primordial universe’s first stars.

I watched the spark of cosmic dawn, through 3D glasses. Sitting in front of a projector at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University, I marveled at filaments of dark matter, a ghostly gray on the screen, branching between halos as the universe stretched. Maelstroms of newly born stars spiraled to the centers of the halos to form the first galaxies.  

Scientists have been filling in the universe’s origin story for decades, but in the past year, the largest and most advanced space telescope ever built has rewritten the first chapters. Ancient galaxies glimpsed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are brighter, more numerous, and more active than anticipated, revealing a frenetic opening to the saga of space and time.

Webb cannot see the first stars, though, as they weren’t bright enough to detect individually. These early monsters blazed hot and grew immense before erupting in supernovae a few million years after flaring to life—a blip in astronomical time.

“We really slowed things down a little bit here,” said Tom Abel, a computational cosmologist and my guide through the simulations. He wore an earring of a human figure curled in the fetal position; it reminded me of the closing shot of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a child in a womb floats in space. “It’s just so crazy fast. The full realistic version would have been much faster flashes.

Those flashes, the supernovae of stars up to hundreds of times the mass of the sun, transformed the universe. New elements were generated—oxygen to make water, silicon to build planets, phosphorus to power cells—and scattered throughout the expanse. The first stars also broke apart the atoms of the surrounding hydrogen gas, burning away the cosmic haze and making things transparent—a key time known as reionization. As the fog lifted, pockets of stars merged, swirling into bigger and bigger assemblages, including the seed of our own Milky Way.

Abel began modeling the birth of the first stars in the 1990s, when no one knew what the earliest astronomical object was, whether a black hole or a Jupiter-size body or something else. Through computer simulations, he and his colleagues helped determine that the first things had to be stars, kindled in places where gravity slowly won out over gas pushing outward. But eventually Abel moved on from star-birth simulations; he thought there was nothing more to learn.  

For Hungry Minds

Then came Webb.  

Launched on Christmas morning in 2021, the space telescope is now positioned nearly a million miles from Earth. Its 21-foot-4-inch gold-coated primary mirror captures the light of ancient galaxies, which has been traveling through space for more than 13 billion years, revealing the galaxies as they were in the distant past. ( How do you create a telescope unlike anything we’ve had before? These photos show us. )

Astronomers expected to find some of these infant galaxies with Webb. They didn’t expect to find so many—or that the discoveries could shake their understanding of galactic history.  

The deepest galaxy survey   of the universe ever undertaken kicked off in September 2022, when an international collaboration known as JADES , or the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, began using Webb to observe patches of sky for dozens of hours at a time. Two weeks after observations began, the collaboration gathered in Tucson at the University of Arizona to discuss the first results.  

In a modern five-story building with a large, open-air atrium designed to evoke a slot canyon, some 50 astronomers packed into a classroom. A handful stood at the back or brought in extra chairs to sit along the walls. “I’m going to have to start reserving bigger rooms,” said Marcia Rieke, an astronomer at the university and one of the leaders of the collaboration.  

The scientists, from tenured professors to twentysomething graduate students, were preoccupied with the mosaic on their laptops: hundreds of images freshly captured by Webb and stitched together. The picture, shared with the team only days before, contained tens of thousands of galaxies and other celestial objects. Excited murmuring ran through the group as they pointed out things to one another that had never been seen: active star-forming regions, glowing galactic centers where black holes might be, and reddish blobs of light from galaxies so distant only Webb could spot them.

“This is a little bit like kids in the candy shop,” Rieke said to me.  

Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope , our previous window into the universe’s distant past, Webb was designed to observe in the infrared, which makes it ideal for capturing early starlight. Those rays left their source as ultraviolet but were stretched to redder wavelengths by the expansion of the universe, a phenomenon known as redshift. The higher the redshift, the farther and older the target.

Rieke managed the proceedings with a combination of unfeigned delight and sage reflection, chiming in to answer a technical question or ambling over to a team member between talks to discuss the workings of the telescope. Besides being a lead scientist on JADES, she’s the principal investigator of Webb’s near-infrared camera, or NIRCam —the source of the mosaic of galaxies on everyone’s laptop. She oversaw its design, a 330-pound assemblage of mirrors, lenses, and detectors to drink in the light of the universe and study it through different filters.  

“These images are everything we could have hoped for,” she said.

But not everything on the telescope was functioning perfectly. JADES’s near-infrared spectrograph, or NIRSpec , had been experiencing electrical shorts that created spots of light and drowned out astronomical targets in some of the observations. The instrument splits light into spectra, allowing scientists to piece together the chemical composition of a galaxy and precisely measure its redshift. While the NIRCam images could be used to estimate the distances to galaxies, NIRSpec was needed to confirm them.  

The electrical shorts delayed some of the team’s observations, a development that turned out to be serendipitous. The astronomers had planned to use NIRSpec to examine objects already known from Hubble, but now they could change the targets to galaxies only just discovered by NIRCam.  

“We just went crazy looking through this data that no one had ever seen, looking for these candidates,” Kevin Hainline, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, told me later in his office.  

One thing the team couldn’t do was change where the telescope was pointing. It had to find objects already in the field of view—and thanks to a bit of luck, four faraway galaxies detected by NIRCam were sitting in the right spot. Two of those, NIRSpec observations would later confirm , were more distant and ancient than any known before.

The most far-flung of the bunch, called JADES-GS-z13-0, had been formed only 325 million years after the big bang. “I still have the Slack message where I first saw this object in the data and sent it to the group,” Hainline said. “In the craziness of it, I didn’t realize the profundity of this moment of sitting there and being like, Oh, that’s the farthest galaxy that humans have ever seen.”  

Two things are already clear about these early galaxies: There are more of them than expected , and they are surprisingly bright for their age. These anomalies could be because the first stars formed more efficiently than thought or there was a larger proportion of big stars than hypothesized. “However star formation gets going in the early universe, it’s not quite like how we might have predicted,” Rieke says.  

One early galaxy, GN-z11 from some 440 million years after the big bang, is bright enough that Hubble spotted it in 2016. Now Webb has observed the object as well, including taking its spectrum with NIRSpec.  

“This one has everyone sort of confused and excited,” says Emma Curtis-Lake, an astrophysicist at the University of Hertfordshire in England and a member of the NIRSpec team.

Certain elements create bright emission lines in a galaxy’s spectrum, like fingerprints by galactic material. The spectrum of GN-z11 revealed a surprising amount of nitrogen —confounding scientists, who can’t explain its source. Perhaps a population of raging hot stars known as Wolf-Rayet stars scattered nitrogen in pulses of stellar wind. Or maybe several large stars collided, mixing up the material in their cores and surfaces and releasing nitrogen in the process.  

GN-z11 may also host a supermassive black hole, which would be remarkable for this early time. It’d be “the most distant black hole that we’ve seen,” Curtis-Lake says.  

Obscured at the center of the bright galaxy, it was exposed by spectral lines that Curtis-Lake calls “little hidden monsters.” These lines suggest that material is moving rapidly in a dense area, swirling at roughly a million miles an hour—the kind of thing you would expect to see near a black hole. But how one of these objects could have grown so rapidly remains unsolved.  

“This ain’t like it used to be ,” said Rieke’s husband, George, as he stepped into a control room that doubled as a kitchenette. “No,” Marcia agreed. “There’s five times as many monitors.”  

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The couple had offered to show me an old telescope in the mountains near Tucson, where they spent much of their early careers. Both astronomers at the University of Arizona, they’d met in 1972, when George hired Marcia out of grad school. The 61-inch telescope on Mount Bigelow was fairly new then, used to make maps of the lunar surface. It became one of the leading observatories in the budding field of infrared astronomy, a grandfather of sorts to Webb.

The Riekes helped facilitate this succession. While Marcia oversaw the development of NIRCam, George is the lead scientist on Webb’s mid-infrared instrument, or MIRI . The Riekes were trained to stay awake through the night, slowly adjusting the telescope to keep a target in sight as Earth rotated. Their acolytes today can do most of their work from laptops.  

“Just a bunch of wimps,” George quipped.  

In the 1970s Marcia and George used the telescope on Mount Bigelow to make some of the first infrared observations of the Milky Way’s center. Scientists had assumed this part of our galaxy was “a collection of old, uninteresting stars,” Marcia explained. But in infrared light, turbulent pockets of gas with rapid star formation were revealed. “That whole picture got changed,” George added.  

At the time, the infrared light of the cosmos was only just coming into view. New sensors tuned to the infrared revealed this previously hidden part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is the full range of light, from gamma rays to radio waves. The telescope on Mount Bigelow helped fill a gap in observations of the local universe, and Webb has similarly plugged a hole in our view of the deep cosmos.

Many of the early-career astronomers working on Webb are nearly frantic in their excitement, breathlessly discussing new discoveries and racing to publish scientific papers. Marcia and George, who helped reveal new wonders of our own galaxy, don’t seem to be in that kind of rush. The space observatory is working well, and the cosmic missives it has begun to receive will be deciphered in due time.

But to fully understand our cosmic origins, we will need more than just Webb.  

On a recent April morning , I squinted in the sunlight on an expansive plateau between snowcapped volcanoes in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Plastic tubes tickled my nostrils with the flow of oxygen, a requirement for anyone visiting the 16,400-foot-high site of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).  

The sky was a deeper shade of blue up there, with fewer molecules in the atmosphere to scatter the light—the very thing that makes this place perfect for astronomy. Towering before me were dozens of four-story-tall radio dishes, white sentinels scattered across the Chajnantor plateau. They pivoted in unison to lock onto a new target.  

Among the most advanced radio observatories on the planet, ALMA is also one of the few tools capable of examining the early galaxies being discovered by Webb, albeit in a different light. Webb captures starlight punching through the dust of these galaxies, while ALMA searches for the glow of the dust itself, heated by the stars within.  

“These first dust grains come from supernova explosions, so you can indirectly obtain information about the first supernova explosions and the first population of stars,” says María Emilia De Rossi, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Astronomy and Space Physics (IAFE) in Buenos Aires.  

ALMA has trained its radio dishes on some of the early galaxies, but in most of its first attempts, the array wasn’t able to find any dust emissions. This could mean that the galaxies are in their infant stages and have not yet produced much dust through stellar explosions, or it could mean that some are actually closer than thought.  

In one case, ALMA detected an emission line just beside a target from Webb , perhaps indicating that the galaxy’s stars had blown the dust away or that two galaxies in different phases of their lives were in the process of merging.

ALMA’s first attempts to detect the galaxies discovered by Webb were only glances, short-duration observations slotted into its busy schedule. Astronomers plan to point the array at some of these galaxies for longer periods, searching for faint signals that could reveal how much dust they have generated and, crucially, how many heavy elements they have produced—an indication of how far along they are in galactic evolution.  

Toward the end of my visit, I stopped by an enormous hangar at ALMA’s operations facility, lower at 10,000 feet. Two of the towering radio dishes had been brought down from the high site on a 28-wheel transporter vehicle. Workers on lifts were busy replacing some of the dishes’ components, part of a series of upgrades to make the observatory even more capable.  

Soon the dishes would be returned to the plateau—ready to swing their gaze back to the firmament, primed to tackle the mysteries of primordial galaxies. 

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AI may be to blame for our failure to make contact with alien civilisations

Sir Bernard Lovell chair of Astrophysics and Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester

Disclosure statement

Michael Garrett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Manchester provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has progressed at an astounding pace over the last few years. Some scientists are now looking towards the development of artificial superintelligence (ASI) — a form of AI that would not only surpass human intelligence but would not be bound by the learning speeds of humans.

But what if this milestone isn’t just a remarkable achievement? What if it also represents a formidable bottleneck in the development of all civilisations, one so challenging that it thwarts their long-term survival?

This idea is at the heart of a research paper I recently published in Acta Astronautica. Could AI be the universe’s “great filter” – a threshold so hard to overcome that it prevents most life from evolving into space-faring civilisations?

This is a concept that might explain why the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti) has yet to detect the signatures of advanced technical civilisations elsewhere in the galaxy.

The great filter hypothesis is ultimately a proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox . This questions why, in a universe vast and ancient enough to host billions of potentially habitable planets, we have not detected any signs of alien civilisations. The hypothesis suggests there are insurmountable hurdles in the evolutionary timeline of civilisations that prevent them from developing into space-faring entities.

I believe the emergence of ASI could be such a filter. AI’s rapid advancement, potentially leading to ASI, may intersect with a critical phase in a civilisation’s development – the transition from a single-planet species to a multiplanetary one.

This is where many civilisations could falter, with AI making much more rapid progress than our ability either to control it or sustainably explore and populate our Solar System.

The challenge with AI, and specifically ASI, lies in its autonomous, self-amplifying and improving nature. It possesses the potential to enhance its own capabilities at a speed that outpaces our own evolutionary timelines without AI.

The potential for something to go badly wrong is enormous, leading to the downfall of both biological and AI civilisations before they ever get the chance to become multiplanetary. For example, if nations increasingly rely on and cede power to autonomous AI systems that compete against each other, military capabilities could be used to kill and destroy on an unprecedented scale. This could potentially lead to the destruction of our entire civilisation, including the AI systems themselves.

In this scenario, I estimate the typical longevity of a technological civilisation might be less than 100 years. That’s roughly the time between being able to receive and broadcast signals between the stars (1960), and the estimated emergence of ASI (2040) on Earth. This is alarmingly short when set against the cosmic timescale of billions of years.

This estimate, when plugged into optimistic versions of the Drake equation – which attempts to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilisations in the Milky Way – suggests that, at any given time, there are only a handful of intelligent civilisations out there. Moreover, like us, their relatively modest technological activities could make them quite challenging to detect.

Wake-up call

This research is not simply a cautionary tale of potential doom. It serves as a wake-up call for humanity to establish robust regulatory frameworks to guide the development of AI, including military systems.

This is not just about preventing the malevolent use of AI on Earth; it’s also about ensuring the evolution of AI aligns with the long-term survival of our species. It suggests we need to put more resources into becoming a multiplanetary society as soon as possible – a goal that has lain dormant since the heady days of the Apollo project , but has lately been reignited by advances made by private companies.

As the historian Yuval Noah Harari noted , nothing in history has prepared us for the impact of introducing non-conscious, super-intelligent entities to our planet. Recently, the implications of autonomous AI decision-making have led to calls from prominent leaders in the field for a moratorium on the development of AI, until a responsible form of control and regulation can be introduced.

But even if every country agreed to abide by strict rules and regulation , rogue organisations will be difficult to rein in.

The integration of autonomous AI in military defence systems has to be an area of particular concern. There is already evidence that humans will voluntarily relinquish significant power to increasingly capable systems, because they can carry out useful tasks much more rapidly and effectively without human intervention. Governments are therefore reluctant to regulate in this area given the strategic advantages AI offers , as has been recently and devastatingly demonstrated in Gaza .

This means we already edge dangerously close to a precipice where autonomous weapons operate beyond ethical boundaries and sidestep international law. In such a world, surrendering power to AI systems in order to gain a tactical advantage could inadvertently set off a chain of rapidly escalating, highly destructive events. In the blink of an eye, the collective intelligence of our planet could be obliterated.

Humanity is at a crucial point in its technological trajectory. Our actions now could determine whether we become an enduring interstellar civilisation, or succumb to the challenges posed by our own creations.

Using Seti as a lens through which we can examine our future development adds a new dimension to the discussion on the future of AI. It is up to all of us to ensure that when we reach for the stars, we do so not as a cautionary tale for other civilisations, but as a beacon of hope – a species that learned to thrive alongside AI.

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We're Detecting No Alien Civilizations Because They Were Destroyed by AI, Astrophysicist Proposes

We might be heading down the same path., bottle neck.

If we're alone in the universe, astrophysicist Michael Garrett says it might be because aliens shared an existential problem that we're only just beginning to reckon with: powerful AI.

The advent of an artificial superintelligence (ASI), Garrett proposes in a new paper published in the journal Acta Astronautica , could be preventing the long-term survival of alien civilizations — and perhaps impeding their evolution into space-faring, multi-planetary empires.

It's a hypothesis that might even help answer the Fermi Paradox, which asks why we still haven't detected alien civilizations when our indescribably vast universe is abundant with habitable worlds.

"Could AI be the universe's 'great filter' — a threshold so hard to overcome that it prevents most life from evolving into space-faring civilizations?" Garrett, who is the Sir Bernard Lovell chair of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, wrote in an essay for The Conversation .

According to Garrett, an ASI would not only be smarter than humans, but would "enhance its own capabilities at a speed that outpaces our own evolutionary timelines without AI."

And therein lie the "enormous" risks. If AI systems gain power over military capabilities, for example, the wars they wage could destroy our entire civilization.

"In this scenario, I estimate the typical longevity of a technological civilization might be less than 100 years," Garrett wrote.

"That's roughly the time between being able to receive and broadcast signals between the stars (1960), and the estimated emergence of ASI (2040) on Earth," he added. "This is alarmingly short when set against the cosmic timescale of billions of years."

Military Mishaps

To be sure, Garrett's proposal is just one potential "great filter" answer to the Fermi Paradox. It could also simply be that the universe is far too vast — and intelligence far too rare, or the time scales too epic — for civilizations to encounter each other.

But don't let that downplay AI's risks, even if right now they still seem relatively tame. Questions abound over the legality of ingesting copyrighted materials , like books and artworks, to train generative AI models. We're also having to confront the technology's environmental impact too, as the computers that power it consume staggering amounts of water and electricity .

Those aren't quite the spectacular precursors of a dramatic AI apocalypse, but that could quickly change. To address those risks, Garrett calls for strong regulations on AI's development, especially on the technology's integration into military systems, such as how Israel is reportedly using AI to identify airstrike targets in Gaza .

"There is already evidence that humans will voluntarily relinquish significant power to increasingly capable systems," Garrett said, "because they can carry out useful tasks much more rapidly and effectively without human intervention."

"This means we already edge dangerously close to a precipice where autonomous weapons operate beyond ethical boundaries and sidestep international law."

More on aliens and AI: UK Royal Astronomer Says Alien Life Might Be Mega-Weird AI

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Opinion: A Shakespeare sonnet in Spanish, for his birthday

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Orozco is a Mexican poet and diplomat. He is the cultural attaché of the Mexican consulate in San Diego and lives in Point Loma. This essay was translated from Spanish by a member of the Editorial Board.

Traditionally, William Shakespeare’s birthday is celebrated in April. April 23, to be exact. It is a good date — like any other — to remember and return to the current legacy of the English poet, who hasn’t abandoned us.

From the penetrating psychological observation of human passions, to his criticism of power and tyranny, passing through the paradises of his lyrics and the joy of his humor, the English poet still resonates with us. His iridescent verse is heard today as clear and alive as yesterday, whether to meditate on death, condemn the corruption of the powerful or celebrate love. The vast world of his creation, a universe that seems to be constantly expanding, is renewed and renews us every time we read it.

And like Miguel de Cervantes, Shakespeare is necessary and essential to us today, in these times when, as German poet Bertolt Brecht would say, we are forced to defend the obvious, such as the right of a people to exist and not be eradicated from the map and from history. Shakespeare and Cervantes demonstrated in their work a lucid commitment to reality and the arduous process of transforming it into beauty, wisdom and human dignity.

I suggest then that we take Shakespeare’s birthday also as an excuse to celebrate the spirit of translation, especially in the space of this multicultural border, where the exchange between Spanish and English is such a common daily reality that it often goes unnoticed. Translation thus represents a first act of diplomacy, understood as a form of humanism in action.

Of the 154 sonnets published in 1609, we take here number 76, in which Shakespeare speaks of his verse and of that which, like love in humans and the sun in nature, is simultaneously old and new. In the game of literary translation I decided to use hendecasyllable verses, the traditional ones of the sonnet in Spanish, for this version.

Why is my verse so barren of new pride, So far from variation or quick change? Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods, and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost tell my name, Showing their birth, and where they did proceed? O know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument, So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent: For as the sun is daily new and old, So is my love still telling what is told.

Soneto 76 ¿Por qué carece mi verso de orgullo, de cambio y variación tan alejado? ¿Por qué no sigo el tiempo que vivimos y escribo en el confuso y turbio modo? ¿Por qué he de escribir lo mismo siempre cerrando la creación en una imagen cada verbo mi nombre delatando mostrando su nacimiento y origen? Hacia ti escribo siempre, mi dulce amor, y amor y tú serán siempre mi tema. Solo resta hacer mi palabra nueva, dispendio haciendo de lo ya gastado. Como el sol que es viejo y nuevo cada vez, mi amor relata así su misma historia.

Poetry, the highest level of writing, sharpens our perception to observe and appreciate the world more precisely, to understand it and ourselves a little more. Today, when technology seems to devour every last minute of our lives, poetry opens up an indispensable time within time.

To return to Shakespeare is to rescue the word from the abyss into which politicking and commerce have plunged it and to return to it its full and legitimate powers. Powers that reveal and enchant, that dazzle and stimulate, that make us doubt and leave us perplexed, that elevate consciousness and transform reality.

Thanks to the often secret and unacknowledged work of translators, we can begin the work of understanding each other and from there, understand that, as on this border, we share the same sea, the same sky, the same land and the same word.

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Nicaraguan Miss Universe and the Cost of Fame

The Nicaraguan Sheynnis Palacios, current Miss Universe, cannot return to Nicaragua and her family members had to go into exile, stated opposition media edited in Costa Rica on Sunday, citing a statement from the owner of the international contest. Palacios’s victory in November in San Salvador triggered the largest street mobilizations in Nicaragua since the 2018 protests, in which she participated and which shook the government of Daniel Ortega. Since her triumph, she has not returned to her country.

“Miss Universe owner confirms the departure of Sheynnis Palacios’s family from Nicaragua and the impossibility of her return to her homeland,” indicated the portal of the newspaper La Prensa, which is now edited in Costa Rica.”The exile of Sheynnis Palacios and ‘her entire family’ is ‘indefinite'”, pointed out the portal 100% Noticias, which also dispatches from the neighboring country.

Both media cited as their source an Instagram post by the Thai co-owner of the Miss Universe contest, entrepreneur Anne Jakrajutatip, but the version has not been confirmed by the Ortega government. After the coronation, Nicaraguan Vice President and Ortega’s wife, Rosario Murillo, claimed that opponents were manipulating her victory, highlighting that Palacios participated in the 2018 protests.

In a message for Mother’s Day, Jakrajutatip greeted Palacios and Nicaraguan entrepreneur Karen Celebertti , former owner of the Miss Universe franchise in Nicaragua, whom the Ortega government banned from returning after the contest in San Salvador.

Jakrajutatip wrote to Palacios: “You are brave, strong, and intelligent, but also very humble and work hard to take care of your mother and all the family who are now outside your homeland. “Miss Universe, whose mother has been residing in the United States for years, had said in January to a Mexican media outlet that she was trying to get her grandmother and brother out of Nicaragua so they could live with her abroad.

The grandmother and brother obtained a visa for the United States and left Nicaragua in April, according to opposition sources. The greeting to Celebertti says: “You made the first Miss Universe in your country, but the price of fame has a global impact where local leadership […] exiled all your family members, including our Queen, […] indefinitely.”

After the San Salvador contest, Celebertti’s husband and a son were imprisoned for two months and then expelled to Mexico. Additionally, the entrepreneur resigned from the Miss Universe franchise in Nicaragua.

The Nicaraguan police accused Celebertti and her family of “actively” participating in “terrorist actions of the failed coup attempt,” referring to the 2018 protests, which left about 300 dead, according to the UN.

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Opinion Guest Essay

The Nerve of Madonna to Pull It Off, Again

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By Mary Gabriel and Kristin J. Lieb

Ms. Gabriel is the author of “Madonna: A Rebel Life.” Dr. Lieb is a professor at Emerson College and the author of “Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry: The Social Construction of Female Popular Music Stars.”

• May 16, 2024

Eighteen years ago, Madonna observed : “Once you pass 35, your age becomes part of the first sentence of anything written. It’s a form of limiting your options and almost putting you in your place. For women, naturally.” She was 47 when she said that and intent on challenging the cultural script that suggested women, especially female performers, had a use-by date.

“Why is that acceptable?” she asked the music writer Brian Hiatt nearly 10 years later, still battling critics who told her to dress her age, act her age — in short, pack it in and retreat from the spotlight because she was past her prime. “Women, generally, when they reach a certain age, have accepted that they’re not allowed to behave a certain way. But I don’t follow the rules.”

To the question “Is she still relevant?” her Celebration Tour, which concluded this month, is proof that she is. Madonna performed before the largest audience ever gathered to watch a female artist and staged the single biggest free stand-alone concert in history: 1.6 million people turned Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach into a dance floor on May 4. According to Billboard , her six-month, 80-show tour grossed $225.4 million, making her the only woman in history to gross more than $100 million during each of six concert tours. (The only solo male in that category is Bruce Springsteen.)

But there’s so much more to her triumph than numbers. That a 65-year-old female pop star pulled off this tour and, despite our increasingly intolerant times, the performance was her most relentlessly and delightfully queer since 1990’s groundbreaking Blond Ambition Tour would be unimaginable, except that it was Madonna. The Celebration Tour proved that Madonna wasn’t afraid of drawing attention to her long career; she owned it proudly.

All of her past selves showed up, in role and in costume, to help celebrate the many ways she has evolved and the many ways she and her collaborators have explored and expressed gender throughout the years. It was a beautifully inclusive, encouraging spectacle. If history is a guide, the social and artistic ramifications of her performance will extend long after her tour.

Madonna’s 1985 Virgin Tour, her debut, included only 40 shows in North America and grossed about $5 million. But its impact on young lives is immeasurable. The young women and girls in her audience were on the cusp of unleashing their sexual selves and embracing their independence, which is what made them so terrifying to a broader society intent on keeping them polite, passive and manageable.

Madonna’s message to her young audience was: Embrace your power, dream big and dare to be your own damned self. That message would resonate through a generation and across the globe, as aspiring Madonnas grew up to be politicians, lawyers, doctors, teachers, members of the armed forces, Third Wave feminists, riot grrrls and pop stars themselves.

Madonna was, in fact, the lead author of the female pop star playbook, and she continues to write the unexplored and perilous back end of it while artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish adapt the front end and more established stars like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift refine what’s possible in the middle. Madonna’s continuous career represents a universe of possibility for their own, despite the entertainment industry’s willingness to jettison midcareer women in favor of artists with younger faces and bodies.

But for women not named Madonna (or Beyoncé or Taylor Swift), growing older and maturing in public is much more fraught. Older men are considered wise, but older women are often ignored or discounted. Thanks to the intervention of the pharmaceutical industry, men are encouraged to have an active sex life into their 80s. The idea of older women having sex remains, for many, repellent.

Madonna has challenged our notions of what a woman should do and be on all those counts: She chooses to age as she sees fit, she says what she believes loudly and forcefully, and she is as proudly sexual as she was in 1985.

With her Celebration Tour, Madonna demonstrated night after night for six months that an older woman can exhibit power and strength — joyfully, generously and defiantly. Her glorious performance was perhaps even sweeter when we recall that hip and knee injuries disrupted her Madame X tour four years ago and a bacterial infection threatened not only the Celebration Tour but also Madonna’s life.

Forty years ago, Madonna showed audiences, particularly girls and women, that they could mute the killjoy chorus keeping them from self-realization. On the Celebration Tour, Madonna doubled down on this idea, encouraging fans to follow their hearts, minds and inner freaks by both being herself onstage and employing diverse and talented dancers to carry that message in their own convincing and resonant ways.

If this were the last tour of Madonna’s career — and we sincerely hope it was not — she would retire as the most influential female pop star of all time, a legitimate legend who wowed audiences, defied expectations and broke records. Having served more than 40 years in the public eye, she could take a holiday, take some time to celebrate. It would be, it would be so nice.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Kristin J. Lieb is a professor at Emerson College and the author of “Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry.”

Mary Gabriel is the author of “Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art” and ”Madonna: A Rebel Life.”

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The Spinoff

The Sunday Essay May 16, 2024

Living across the road from loafers lodge.

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In some ways, I couldn’t have been closer to the tragedy. In others, I was a whole universe away.

This essay was first published on 3 March, 2024. The Sunday Essay  is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

H ad you been trying to market a suburb in Wellington, the Loafers Lodge was not the sort of landmark you’d want to draw attention to. Four storeys tall and infinitely bleak, the building stands on a busy corner between John Street and Adelaide Road. It’s a newly hip area, across from a homeware shop where I once spent $59 on a candle and a coffee shop that sells vegan doughnuts on Fridays. The Snickers one is my favourite. When I was a kid, the building was white with a blue trim, as though someone had captured the sky and turned it inside out. In most of my memories, the building is the colour it is now: a despairing brown, like a malt drink made with powdered milk that expired in 2019, alongside hopes of a capital gains tax.

From my apartment, I have a view of the left side of the building, which has been largely walled over. For years it has hosted a giant billboard. As with so much of Wellington’s prime real estate, this billboard had been capitalised on by Lowe & Co. For a while the company displayed a sign that said, “We can see your next house from here.” Then they replaced that with, “We’re not going, are you?” That one was for a City Mission fundraiser, in which you could buy tickets to an event you didn’t attend, with all the proceeds providing essentials for people who were struggling. It was a good premise, a clever campaign too, but what I really got a kick out of were the layers of irony. Lowe & Co was fundraising for people in need, on a building filled with people in need, in a city that was becoming – with their help – increasingly unaffordable. “And it’s for an event they literally don’t have to show up to,” I moaned to workmates, “I mean, that’s the extent of their community engagement: staying in their own homes.”

From the road, I could see through the Lodge’s grimy narrow windows and into its rooms, and I could also see its signs. There were three, in a mix of fonts, sizes and colours, offering, in turn, ‘ACCOMMODATION,’ ‘Superior Rooms,’ and an illustration of loafers, outlined in a thick black paint and covered in white polka dots. I always felt that there was a slight ambiguity about what the pun meant. Was it a lodge named after, or perhaps for, shoes? Or the people who lived there? 

While its website marketed the Lodge as an affordable and convenient option for short-term stays in Wellington, it didn’t really cater to travellers. Most of the residents were – for one reason or another, and often for many reasons – vulnerable. By and large, they were not the sort of subjects that make for sympathetic news stories. Folks with significant mental health and substance abuse issues, people with criminal records, criminal deportees too, packaged up in legal jargon and sent back here from Australia to become someone else’s problem. I didn’t know a single one of them, and I didn’t try to get to know them. Instead, morning and evening, I smiled vaguely as I passed them by, on my way to better things. 

A lthough it wasn’t clear from the outside just how bad the building’s condition was, I could hazard a guess that it wasn’t great. One reason is that I work in housing policy, and so have some background on New Zealand’s housing deficit, the length of our emergency housing waitlists, the quality of our rental stock. The other and more pertinent reason is that I have eyes. Irrespective of the angle from which you viewed the lodge, the place looked grungy. 

While the building had been refurbished since its previous life as a house of the Lord, it wasn’t the kind of sexy church conversion that makes it into the glossy pages of a House & Garden magazine. There were no stained-glass windows to preserve or brick walls to reveal. There were no vaulted ceilings to add grandeur and monumentality, or to protect the inside of the building should the roof catch on fire. 

As a bureaucrat, though, my job is to analyse and advise, not to advocate. In this case, my analysis and advice was clear: boarding houses fill a gap in the market for people who, without systemic change, would otherwise be homeless.

It was this job in housing policy that I called in sick to when I awoke one Tuesday morning with a headache, sore throat and blocked nose. I’d slept, as I often do, with the windows open, and so I should have realised what was happening. Somehow, it wasn’t until I logged onto the Herald that I found out that the Lodge had gone up in flames. 

Living so near the hospital, I think I must have become desensitised to the sound of tragedy. I either no longer register the blare of sirens, or if I do, I register it like any other background noise. The drip from a tap, the tick of a clock, the sound of someone dying: all the same to me, especially at night, which was when the fire began.

Initial reports indicated that people had likely died, but it took a while to confirm how many, and even longer to confirm who they had once been. To remove the bodies, five in total, police cordoned off a large stretch of Adelaide Road and redirected traffic. While the operation was underway, my workmates and I complained about the commute time. We were already contending with Wellington’s bustastrophe, and now this? 

“I drove into work today,” my boss said one morning, throwing her bags onto a desk.

“Are you planning on Venmoing the Council for all that you’ve spent on parking and Ubers?” I joked, swivelling in my chair to face her.

It was Wellington City Council that had been advised, and failed, to conduct annual checks on buildings like Loafers Lodge. Over the past decade, the place had only had two on-site inspections, and the most recent one in 2018 found fire risks. These were the sorts of details released by the Herald, Stuff and RNZ over the coming weeks. We found out that, while the building had fire alarms, they regularly went off, so were ignored by many residents. No sprinklers had been installed, because they weren’t a regulatory requirement for buildings of that height. The front door had been kicked in by ex-tenants, and while it was usable, it was broken, with a sign directing people to the side entrance.

Once the smoke clouds began to dissipate, it became obvious the top floor of the Lodge had received the worst damage from the blaze. Black soot poured from the windows and clung to the side of the building, so thick it looked like ink. A bunch of window panes had been broken; by the heat, by the hands of desperate people trying to get out. At the advice of the fire department, I kept my own windows closed for the duration of the clean-up, because in addition to bed bugs, the building was also filled with asbestos, particles of which must now be in the lungs of the survivors.  

While it was still an abstraction, I referred to the case – through allusion rather than outright – in meetings, as an example of why we needed better and more affordable housing options. I had done the victims no justice when they were alive, and in this way, I felt as though I could do them some justice in death. Now I realise how flawed, and moreover, how insulting my logic was. I turned each of the five men, and all of their neighbours, into a political rallying cry, as is so easy to do with people on the margins. Even if we had reached some kind of an end, those people were not a means to achieving it. 

As the bodies were identified, stories about each person flooded my personalised news feed, all of the men reduced to bite-sized chunks, big enough to grab the headlines but small enough to fit on the screen of my phone. I recognised two, but did not know either of them. Nor did I know the others, my neighbours from whom the fire took not just every personal effect they owned, but also their community. Just a kilometre away from one another, we inhabited very, very different worlds.

I t was after the fire, when I began to care about the building, that I learned it was once a Pentecostal church. Pentecostals believe that when someone dies, they will spend an eternity in heaven or hell, depending on whether or not they have been saved. Baptism is an important part of being saved, symbolising the death of the old, sinful life and birth of the new life in which Jesus is accepted as Lord and Saviour. 

Across the branches of Christianity, baptism is practised in different ways, including through aspersion (sprinkling water over the head) and affusion (pouring water over the head). Pentecostals typically practise immersion baptism because, according to the World Mission Society Church of God website, “When burying a dead body, it is not enough to just sprinkle a shovelful of dirt over it once or twice.” This view is consistent with the doctrine more broadly, which holds that faith cannot be found through ritual or thinking, but must be powerfully experienced through the human body, a temple of the Holy Spirit.

It took only five minutes for firefighters to arrive at the Lodge in trucks carrying hundreds of gallons of water. By that point, though, the place was well on its way to being uninhabitable – or perhaps, more uninhabitable than it had always been. Throughout the night and into the next day, almost 90 firefighters from 33 trucks battled the blaze. The truck carrying a 32-metre ladder was out of order, under maintenance. According to some reports, it had been out of order for more than 400 days. While firefighters awaited a back-up truck, they used the standard 17-metre ladders to battle the “nightmare scenario,” as one fire chief put it. 

Nearby cafés, including the one that sells the Snickers doughnuts I like, encouraged patrons to support the fire and police services. Those services did, by all accounts, an excellent job. They were not just contending, though, with the work of a 48-year-old arsonist. They were contending with years of policy and regulation that had in effect doused the place in gasoline. 

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While the Lodge no longer exists, the building itself is still standing, and I continue to walk by it, morning and evening, on my way to work. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, the bus-stop across the road was filled with flowers, cards, and pictures of the victims. For a time, a few former Lodge residents kept vigil. They may have been the same residents who alerted their neighbours to the blaze, calling for them and knocking on their doors, before running or crawling or jumping to safety.  

There is a security fence around the first floor of the building now. At some point, I assume the whole place will be demolished. There are no set plans for the site, as far as I know, although I imagine its size and location will so appeal to developers that it will sell itself. While Lowe & Co have taken the billboard down, it remained up there for so long, still easily visible from my apartment. 

“A round of silent applause,” it read.