At our present time, the boundless frontiers of space are being magnified and mapped by the eyes of scientists that are not but a nanometer relative to the size of their galaxy. Such infinitesimally small creatures are not living without an ounce of humility when it comes to the reverence of the universe that created it. That we should ascribe this grand design to the genetics of chance and not quantum creationism- whether by the route of conscious imagination or unconscious projection- can only mean that we’ve stripped the tangible of its soul and deemed it a material vessel of our thirst for reason. By doing this, we have robbed the universe of its freedom and only made it a source for recording information, information that helps us find ways to improve our species, while selfishly filtering out the type that benefits the environment around us.
Listen friends, we’ve discovered a galaxy that is a hundred times as dense as our own. It is the densest galaxy in the known universe, and it could fit approximately 100 stars in between our sun and the one closest to it, Alpha Centauri. Imagine what it would be like to live on a planet that orbits one of these stars. The stars at night would shine so big and bright that the night sky would appear to be a shimmering cavern of ice crystals. The darkness of deep space may not even be able to penetrate its density. Instead of blackness, empty space would take on the various shades of luminosity propagated by these stars, blinding in their magnitude and requiring thicker eyeballs for us to see from. Perhaps this planet’s atmosphere is also thick in ozone, which would turn even the night sky into a color higher on the visual spectrum, instead of the light blue we see on Earth. Multiple stars would be able to be seen during the daytime as well, making the sunrises and sunsets difficult to distinguish between ordinary hours. Would there be any way to differentiate night from day on this planet?
Something as swarming with color as a dense region of a galaxy like this filled with nebulous gas should inspire us to yield to the chaos from which we are born. The more evidence we find that challenges conventional physics, the more we will be forced to abandon our expectations and embrace the infinite. Reason has been corrupted into the destructive ability to desecrate infinite potential, chop it up into little pieces with calculus, and use it to optimize our resources. The more we discover, the more we will recognize the diversity of matter and welcome the prospects of interstellar biodiversity that comes with it. What other abominations of matter are we prepared to witness? We’ve already found that it is raining diamonds on Neptune and molten glass on HD 189733b. On a planet where it rains glass, might its terrain look like the swirly mutations that come about when glassblowing? Walk into a glassblowing museum and imagine that all its artifacts could resemble the landscape of an entire planet. That would only be one example of the multiplex forms that matter can take.
We should not think the universe made our planet special by supplying it with all the mathematical necessities required to sustain life on one of its planets. There are many other planets out there in which the requirements of life approach those of Earth, and some may even exceed them. If we had been born on another planet, its evolutionary restrictions might have deterred us from becoming humans, and instead we’d have become whatever environmental adaptation that planet required of us. And so, as with inorganic diversity in the universe, we are likely to find a high amount of organic diversity out there as well.
Ah, the universe and its mysteries. What we can see is only an illusion, bounded by our senses and the remoteness of our observations. Like a fly trapped in a room, we are limited in our perspective and cannot see the bigger picture, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that we can. Indeed, this why the universe is not round, as we expected it to be. The universe is not round for the same reason that men thought the Earth was flat.
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