Tag: Committee For A Bigger Universe

Transcendent Science and Knowery.

Moon Shot

THE FOUR ASTRONAUTS who recently swooped around the Moon and back again – Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen, may their names live forever – did more than visually explore Earth’s neighboring world from close quarters for the first time in decades.

They injected into this world a burst of hope and vicarious glory sorely needed in this age of cynicism, distrust, chaos and doomcrying.

Think of it. When’s the last time you felt a surge of positivity and pride at human accomplishments? Speaking strictly for myself, it’s been at least one year, three months, and a day or two.

But watching the Artemis mission’s textbook-perfect splashdown and recovery had me shedding at least one tear of grateful joy.

This is what humans can do when we all work together, I thought, dabbing my eyes with a tissue. This is what’s possible.

I don’t know about you, but I needed that.

Skygazer’s Arsenal

A FRIEND OF MINE, rendered rarely speechless, became so when I let slip an astronomical secret. She pressed me for details, and because you might want to know too, I’m passing them along:

The reason I have 18 astronomy apps on my [Android phone] is that, although some do overlap, each has a little something the others lack. Most are free, but I have also tossed a few bucks at my personal faves. They are… (drumroll)

– Star atlases/planetarium programs: Stellarium, SkySafari, SkyView, Sky Map

– Target catalogues (where and when to look for cool, if sometimes transient, stuff): TheSkyLive, Nightshift, Stargazing Hub, Telescopius

– International Space Station trackers: ISS Detector, Heavens-Above, ISS Live Now, Spot the Station

– Weather: Astrospheric, Field Guide to Clouds

– Solar/lunar observation: SpaceWeatherLive, LunarMap HD

– Misc: The Golden Record, NASA

And there you have it. Mystery solved, I hope!

Almost all of these are available at the Google Play Store. (Nightshift is no longer in development, alas, but it’s still my go-to for current weather-satellite imagery and customized-to-my-equipment “targets.”) If you find any of these useful, I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Wholly Toil

IT’S NO SECRET that I loathe AI.

Well, “loathe” is rather strong language, especially since I believe modern tech in general to be an evolutionary leap comparable to the discovery of fire, or the invention of the wheel. Let’s just say I am deeply distrustful of AI, and more than a little saddened and dismayed by how quickly and eagerly it’s infiltrated our culture, our devices, and our minds.

Fortunately, I have some Jewish ammunition backing up my “danger-Will-Robinson” disdain. In this week’s edition of The Forward‘s “Looking Forward” newsletter, Louis Keene makes a good case for why Judaism may hold the key to the AI Resistance.

“That key is the Jewish value of עֲמֵילוּת (ameilut), or toil,” Keene writes. “As far as Jewish values go, ameilut is an obscure one. It lacks the celebrity swagger of its better-known peers like chesed [lovingkindness] and tzedakah [righteousness] or the political power of tikkun olam [“repairing the world,” sometimes understood as social action]. … Yet I believe it is just as crucial. Yes, toiling is a mitzvah. And in the age of AI, ameilut can be a human road map.”

The concern among fervently religious Jews and others, Keene relates, is that anyone can feed, say, the week’s Torah portion into ChatGPT and have it spit out a sermon. But that misses the point. Knowledge shouldn’t be commodified – it should be earned through a lengthy (and rewarding) process. Ameilut means toiling for the sake of personal growth. It’s about the means, not the end; the discovery, not the destination.

A cliche, perhaps, but an apt and important one. And a warning: don’t embrace a shiny new toy without examining, or at least giving serious thought to, any consequences.

“Cheap Astronomy”

NOT ALL AMATEUR STARGAZING can, or even should, be done with equipment.

Sometimes, you look up at the stars and wonder while taking out the trash. Or you might look up and wonder what that bright steady light is: a UFO/UAP? Hovering helicopter? Planet? Or you might even ponder that most mighty of imponderables: “Where did this all come from – and what’s out there anyway?”

Enter “Cheap Astronomy (Explore the Universe on a Shoestring),” a website (and state of mind) from our plucky Down Under astro-siblings. Written in typical dry-witted, no-nonsense Australian style, their articles and podcasts are listed under the following headings: “Naked Eye Astronomy,” “Fun with Binoculars,” “Cheap Telescopes,” “Too Cold Outside,” “Cheap Cosmology,” “Reader Contributions,” and others. Though mostly focused on observing from the Southern Hemisphere, even we Northerners can find ample material to marvel over and apply to our own hobby/lifestyle*.

Cheap Astronomy’s approach to skywatching may be mildly tongue-in-cheek, but truly, there’s much serious fun to explore here. So what’s keeping you? Check ’em out today – or tonight!

* That question – “Is amateur astronomy a mere hobby, or an all-consuming lifestyle?” – is an old and shifty one. Take a good look in your inner mirror before answering.

First Graf: Sidereus Nuncio

PERHAPS THE GREATEST THING ABOUT Galileo Galilei’s first publication, translated from the Latin as The Sidereal Messenger, is his sense of adventure at being the first known human to telescopically observe and painstakingly chronicle the night sky.

Galileo recorded his unprecedented experience in 1610 CE, a time of adventurous European discoveries in general. His detailed and methodical observations will be thrilling to anyone also observing the same celestial sights for the first time through a simple 20x (read: low-power) backyard telescope. Science historian Albert Van Helden’s superb 1989 translation reveals Galileo’s excitement and wonder on every page, and adds valuable context via explanatory bookending and notes.

That era being one of grand aspirations and flowery speech, Galileo’s grateful bow to his patron, Duke Cosimo II de Medici, is fully titled, “SIDEREAL MESSENGER, unfolding great and very wonderful sights and displaying to the gaze of everyone, but especially philosophers and astronomers, the things that were observed by GALILEO GALILEI, Florentine patrician and public mathematician of the University of Padua, with the help of a spyglass lately devised by him, about the face of the Moon, countless fixed stars, the Milky Way, nebulous stars, but especially about four planets flying around the star of Jupiter at unequal intervals and periods with wonderful swiftness; which, unknown by anyone until this day, the first author detected recently and decided to name MEDICIAN STARS.” (That honorific didn’t stick; instead, the “four planets” are now called by astronomers the “Galilean moons.”)

Let us skip Galileo’s five-page introductory paean to the Duke de Medici and dive right into the first paragraph of the work itself:

In this short treatise I propose great things for inspection and contemplation by every explorer of Nature. Great, I say, because of the excellence of the things themselves, because of their newness, unheard of through the ages, and also because of the instrument with the benefit of which they make themselves manifest to our sight.

“You Can’t Avoid the Void!”

IT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER WHERE or when I was, beyond that it was a high place from which I felt an overwhelming urge to jump.

I felt neither depressed nor sad nor suicidal. But I did feel scared, though mostly of the compulsion. In fact, I retained an echo of those feelings, not to mention utter perplexity, until happening across a healthline.com article which told me that such compulsions are very, very common. Normal, even.

It’s known as the “Call of the Void.” (In the original French, because the French have words for everything experientially interesting, “l’appel du vide.”) In clinical terms, it’s referred to as “High-Place Phenomenon,” and can also involve other aspects of self-harm: leaping in front of a train, steering one’s car into oncoming traffic, or sticking one’s hand into a garbage disposal. Naturally, these urges are quickly suppressed. And no one quite knows why we have such episodes – they may simply be an artifact of our neurological wiring – but it seems related to anxiety: the more anxious one is, the louder the Void calls.

We humans seem to be repelled by, yet attracted to, vast emptiness: the gulfs between stars and galaxies; abyssal ocean depths; wide-open deserts; untenanted warehouses; the view from a mountaintop. (BTW, the worst vertigo I ever experienced was while [very briefly!] standing on my head atop Northern California’s Mount Diablo – I literally felt as though I was dropping into the sky. Brrr.) Perhaps such things remind us of our insignificance. Perhaps we just don’t know what to do with (or in) them. Getting lost in immensity carries a deep discomfort; it blurs the lines we draw between Is and Is-Not. And that can be downright scary.

The most important thing to do when the Void calls? Don’t answer.

A Short Course in Flabbergastery

IN HIS EPIC, THREE-VOLUME Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, the astronomer Robert Burnham, Jr., proposes the following metric:

Let one astronomical unit (the mean Earth-Sun distance) equal one inch. On that same scale, one light-year, or 63,360 astronomical units, equals one mile; in our model, that puts Alpha Centauri, our closest stellar neighbor, just over four miles away.

See how big space is? But let’s go further.

Fig. 1.

In October 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope peered 13.1 billion light-years into one tiny slice of our all-surrounding nothingness (see Fig. 1). On Burnham’s scale, that’s 78,067,190,880,000,000,000,000 miles — or roughly the distance from Earth to just beyond the boundary of interstellar space.

And if your mind is still insufficiently blown, think on this: Except for a handful of relatively close six-rayed stars, the smudges of light you see in Fig. 1 are all galaxies.

GALAXIES. Each containing hundreds of billions of stars, a good many of which are just like our Sun.

Wow. Right?

Contemplating such vasty depths may challenge our sanity. But I also think such a meditation is good for the perspective.

Because in all that unending emptiness, there is only one of each of us: unique, ephemeral, irreplaceable. Enjoy yourself if and while you can — and don’t forget to floss.

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