Artist: Hans Zimmer
Track: First Step
Genre/Year: Original Soundtrack/2014
We begin by acknowledging several truths. These aren’t rooted in interpretation— “my truths or yours”, but woven into the fabric of the cosmos itself.
First, the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second and nothing in the universe can travel faster than light. Second, the universe has a flat curvature, meaning it expands in all directions for all of eternity. An intrepid traveler, in a universe with positive curvature, may set off on a journey and find themselves back home after many moons. But the traveler in a universe with a near flat curvature—our universe—will set off into the horizon never to return to where they began. Three, for all the achievements that we as an evolved species have accomplished, we’ve severely limited capabilities in outer space travel. And finally, four, we can never know of life outside our little cosmic bubble because by the time their message reaches us, their civilization would have long crumbled into dust. A more realistic scenario would be that the sun that sustained them no longer shines, but the distances are so large that we see it in our night sky as it did when it was still burning. The “afterglow” as songwriters Andrew Farriss and Desmond Child would have put it.
And in looking out into the skies for signs of intelligence, we have found exoplanets—rocky spheres that orbit a star like our own Earth does. Most of these will never sustain carbon-based lifeforms. Each of them is light-years away and is a variation of creative hell. On some planets, it rains diamonds, glass, or molten lead. Others are tidally locked with their star; meaning that one side is unbearably hot and the other side is veiled in frigid darkness. Were we to ever live on such a planet, we would all have to live in the thin zone between light and dark. And even then, because of the temperature differences, the zone would be plagued by storms raging at thousands of kilometers per hour. Several Earth-like exoplanets have since been identified, and the closest ones are located within 50 light-years. In perspective, the distance from the Sun to the Earth, or 1 astronomical unit is 8 light-minutes.
Light, in just 8 minutes travels 150 million kilometers through the cold vacuum of space to hit the retinas in our eyes. We see the sun, as it was, 8 minutes ago. Light will take 50 years to travel to one of these exoplanets. And remembering our universal truths, light is the fastest entity in the universe because it’s massless. There is certainly no way that we can traverse such distances without the help of a wormhole that connects these parts of the universe.
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, is set in the year 2067, amid pestilence and dust storms. The Earth is figuratively and literally starving and choking the petty humans that dare to think they have a semblance of control over nature. In desperation, humankind sends a team of four astronauts to a distant part of our universe through a wormhole to scope out 3 exoplanets that revolve around a black hole named Gargantua. When I watched this movie in IMAX, in Cincinnati, I teared up a bit listening to this theme song. Gathering from the truths we’ve discussed before, the team left Earth, possibly to never return, traveling unimaginable distances, all under the realization that time dilation near Gargantua made their loved ones on Earth age faster. On the first candidate exoplanet, dubbed after its discoverer Miller, one hour on the planet equals seven years on Earth. Miller’s planet wasn’t suited for life.
In 1961, President Kennedy declared in front of a special joint session of Congress that he would send an American to the moon and bring them back safely before the 60s ended. In 1969, proud Americans joined millions of viewers from other nations in watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take their first steps on the moon. While this is a massive feat for human civilization to undertake in just 8 years, it seems like the only trip we could ever take into the great void. Mars seems to be the next candidate, but it’s not just a matter of blasting off. We need to calculate orbital positions between our planets and time the flight just right. It’s a 26-month launch window period. A round trip to Mars will take about 21 months to pull off and that includes a 3-month stay on the Red Planet, waiting for the planets to align. It’s not a trip that I expect to see in my lifetime. But even so, from a numbers perspective, the average distance of 225 million kilometers?—Light just takes 12.5 minutes on average.1
We can never leave our own solar system. But our legacy will live on in the unmanned spaceships, Voyager 1 and 2 that have left our playground and are entering deep interstellar space. They are about 156 and 130 astronomical units away and are expected to keep at least one scientific instrument onboard active till 2025.2 Voyager 1 will float towards the constellation Ophiuchus and Voyager 2 towards the constellations of Sagittarius and Pavo.3 When the batteries give out, they will float on, as emissaries of human engineering, alone, billions of kilometers from home.
Carl Sagan, one of humankind’s greatest astronomers and scientists, asked NASA to instruct Voyager 1 to turn its cameras around and take a picture of Earth. On Valentine’s Day, 1990, Voyager 1 snapped this picture and sent it back to Earth.
There it is, folks. All of our collective kindness and evil. Every moment of joy and every moment of rage. The endless cruelties meted out for land, water, resources, and desires of the human flesh. The wars, the rapes, the genocides, the atrocities over political and religious opinions. The only home we ever have and ever can have and we choose suffering over kindness. Sagan wrote poetically and it’s worth reading his book.
But in my exhortation for human kindness in the wake of our species’ insignificance in the grand scheme of things, the Russian playwright Anton Chekov puts it so eloquently, that I’ll close this essay with a quote from Uncle Vanya:
We shall see all the earth’s evil, all our sufferings drown in the mercy that will fill the entire world, and our life will become quiet, tender, sweet, like a caress. I have faith, I have faith.
Thanks for reading, and welcome back to the newsletter.
I am so deeply moved by the music and your words. 🕊