Beyond Grasp

Earlier this month, Venus and the sun were mixing it up in what is known as the transit of Venus. This celestial event, due to unusual planetary alignment , is when Venus glides across the sun’s face and appears in silhouette as a tiny slow-moving black dot. Such transits occur in pairs eight years apart – the last in 2004 – but only take place less than once per century. Given that the next transit won’t appear for another 105 years, few folks are likely to quibble with what a scientist predicted about this month’s phenomenon: "I think this is the last one I'll see." That includes islanders here who tout the longevity of many of our residents, including Mary Cousins who at 104 will be Grand Marshal in this year's 4th of July parade, its theme, appropriately enough, "One Hundred Years."

The Transit of Venus surely makes for some rare sky watching, but in previous centuries, it also helped astronomers calculate the distance between Earth and the sun – what NASA says is approximately 93 million miles. Though visible from all seven continents, Venus’s recent trek could only be viewed in its 7-hour entirety from Asia, the Western Pacific, Alaska, Greenland and Northern Canada. Here in Maine, we had a narrow window at dusk to see little Venus back dropped against the sun thirty times its size. That is, if, as one Maine astronomer warned, “the weather cooperates” – a familiar caveat and a hopeful wish, both doused by a meteorologist who of that day’s rainy and thick cloud cover forecast declared, “it’s looking grim.” A not surprising outcome given our most recent track record of sky conditions thwarting views of the Northern Lights and the Pleiades meteor showers.

In the weeks since, however, there have been numerous clear and cloudless nights of abundance – of stunning sunsets that, truthfully, needed no planetary embellishment, of night skies staggering in their plenitude of uncountable stars the ancients believed were pinholes in the sky’s vault through which light of another outer world shone through. The kind of night skies I’ve had to re-acquaint myself with in my annual return to the island from a city whose refracted and reflected light seems intent on washing away the darkness, of emptying the night of its stars.

Looking up one late, cloudless night not long after the 2012 transit of Venus belonged to history, and I, on a small patch of lawn on a little island was reminded anew of my just-one-barnacle-on-a-rock peewee-ness, I recalled Anthony Doerr’s essay “Window of Possibility.” In it, he gets down to the basics: Earth, he writes, is “a clump of iron and magnesium and nickel, smeared with a thin layer of organic matter, and sleeved in vapor. It whirls along in a nearly circular orbit around a minor star we call the sun.”

Okay, so the sun doesn’t seem so minor to us. We’d surely not exist without it. As Doerr observes, it literally makes the world go round. And it’s huge. Of earth’s’ comparison to the sun, think chickpea and beach ball, he suggests. Comprising 99.9 percent of all the mass in our solar system, the sun leaves a niggling 0.1 percent for us, Venus and all the other planets to fit into. Nevertheless, the sun is considered exceedingly minor in the bigger – much bigger – scheme of things.

The sun, Earth, the rest of our seemingly vast solar system belong to the Milky Way galaxy – home to at least 100 billion stars. And if, like me, you have a hard time wrapping your highly evolved Homo sapiens brain around such a number, Doerr offers this aid: Say you have a bucket with a thousand marbles in it. You’d need to obtain 999,999 more such buckets to get a billion marbles. And then you’d need to repeat that process a hundred times to approximate the number of stars in the galaxy.

The sun is just one of those stars. Just one. A mere mote in the sway of the Milky Way’s gravity. And, as it turns out, it’s not even near the galaxy’s center, but way out on one of its minor arms. Beyond even, the Milky Way’s exurbs. Turns out, folks, the sun and we here on Earth, along with all our oceans and mountains, our cities and all our fellow inhabitants who walk, swim, slink and soar, reside in Nowheresville. (A fact that will no doubt offer small surprise to some bored island teens.)       

Okay, but what, cosmically-speaking, does all this mean? Consider this: the Milky Way isn’t even a major galaxy. Whether spiral-shaped, toothpick-shaped or sombrero-shaped, there are hundreds of thousands of millions of galaxies. Maybe, claims Doerr, as many as 125 billion. It’s very possible the number of galaxies in the universe exceeds the number of stars in the Milky Way. You try doing the math – 100 billion stars in the galaxy, 100 billion galaxies in the universe. That’s way too many zeroes for this noggin to absorb.

Instead, Doerr suggests, say that everyone on Earth were assigned to naming hers or his share of the universe’s stars. We’d each get to name a trillion and a half of them. Or, computed another way, if we were to name a star with each heart beat, we’d likely have to live a whopping 375 lifetimes to do our share.

Thanks to the help of new, ever evolving technologies, along with the granddaddy Deep Field Hubble, astronomers have found more than 200 planets outside our solar system. In recent years, announcements of such seem almost routine. And chances are, numerous stars out in the depths and far reaches have their own planets or planetary systems, other suns their own solar systems.

So what are we to do with such mind-boggling information? What are we to make of the notion, when looking up at a star-packed sky above, say, a small island in the northeast Atlantic, that behind the plentitude our eyes are taking in are thousands more galaxies beyond, streaming away at hundreds of miles per second? Is it possible to believe still that our tiny planet is the only one with microscopically-teeming soil, with oceans tugged into flow and ebb, with plants emitting their essential gasses into the atmosphere? Or with creatures even remotely like me who, faces turned skyward, gaze into the limits of our understanding?

Such unfathomable, almost-impossible-to-process information makes it easier to sympathize with those who don’t mind, and may even encourage, the many ways our often unnecessarily flood-lit highways and parking lots, our increasingly illuminated signage and orange city haze confusing to migrant birds, fill the night with light. As though the intention is to obscure what the incomprehensible infinitude overhead drives home, perhaps inconsolably – our individual, almost equally incomprehensible puniness.   

It’s probably easier, too, to absorb then the transit of Venus and, possibly, to be comforted by the sun, that single, important star, the large, recognizable lozenge easing at day’s end toward the horizon. And that, each night, drops like a gold coin into a bank, held for safe-keeping until another day dawns. More reliable even than the moon forever changing shape and in its new moon phase, seems, even on the clearest nights, to disappear altogether. We vastly prefer to steady ourselves with the known, no?

But how we rob ourselves if we don’t engage with the night sky and its window into enormity. If, either by way of ambient light we’re deprived of it, or, having it available to us, we don’t pause, accept the invitation to step out of the car or onto deck or lawn, and look up, gaze into the inexplicable that gives us pause. Maybe even attempts to adjust our understanding of what we are, where we are.

As told by Doerr, no less than Albert Einstein with a brain whoppingly more capable of comprehension than most of ours, observed: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced, there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection…”