Cartoon villains run the country, and the world is turned upside down. Right is wrong, wrong is right, and America slips backward down the hard-fought mountain of social progress.
So I turn to the night sky.
I watch a slim crescent moon slowly set and, close beside it, astonishingly bright Venus. Their simple beauty is a balm for the sadness, rage, and exhaustion that I feel these days. I turn my gaze higher to where Orion marches across the sky, a familiar old friend. Blue-white Rigel and red Betelgeuse shine at his knee and shoulder, two colorful gems of the night sky. Golden-white Jupiter is almost directly overhead, and to the east is Mars. Tracing a line between these two and Venus, I can imagine the plane of the solar system and the planets’ different orbits: celestial order to set against the human chaos below.
Above Orion and Betelgeuse glitter the Pleiades, a tight cluster of bright young stars shining through the nebula of hydrogen gas and dust that spawned them. And here I pause to reflect.
Betelgeuse is a supergiant star that any day now — maybe tonight, tomorrow, or in 100,000 years — will explode. When it does, a shock wave will propagate across light-years, and many thousands of years later, that shock wave will strike a nebula much like the one surrounding the Pleiades, compressing its gas and dust and destabilizing the nebula’s delicate gravitational balance. This will ignite star birth within the nebula. Dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of stars will blaze into life, creating a new cluster for some other civilization elsewhere in the galaxy to look up at.
Star death provides not only the impetus for the creation of new stars but also the raw materials for the planets that will come to orbit them.
In the final years, hours, minutes, and seconds before a giant star explodes, it forges within its deepest layers elements like carbon, oxygen, silicon and iron. When the star finally dies, the resulting supernova explosion creates even more elements, like calcium, nickel, gold, and silver. These spread out in space, following behind the shock wave, dispersing a wealth of heavy elements. Some of this material mixes with nebulae like the Pleiades.
New stars form in dense knots of nebular material. When nuclear fusion ignites and a star is born, it is still surrounded by a vast disk of leftover hydrogen gas and dust, which is essentially composed of the elements created by the dying star’s supernova shock wave. Specks collide and merge; they grow larger; their gravity attracts more elements to them. In a cosmic eyeblink, the dense iron-nickel cores of new planets form. All the debris of one exploding star is recycled into the planets, asteroids, and comets that orbit a new one.
Cosmic violence, at least, begets creation. With the exception of hydrogen, present since the beginning of the universe itself, nearly every atom in our bodies was forged in the thermonuclear core of a dying star or in the cataclysm of a supernova. Star death gives us the silicon in the rocks beneath our feet, the oxygen in the air we breathe, the iron in our blood, and the calcium in our bones.
I gaze at Betelgeuse and the Pleiades a little longer. We are stardust and physical kin to these wonderful things. What an honor! Yet we disgrace that kinship by our actions toward each other, our planet, and the creatures we share it with.
Some people tell me that looking at the stars makes them feel that they and our Earthly troubles are insignificant in the larger universe, and that this gives them comfort. “No matter what we do,” they say, “no matter how terrible, it doesn’t really matter. We’re nothing. Our lives are tiny and meaningless.”
I understand the sentiment, but it’s not one I share. I don’t much like feeling meaningless.
Others have said to me that they like knowing that no matter how bad things get down here, at least we can’t mess up the stars.
Again, I understand the sentiment. But given our record on Earth, I wouldn’t count on it.
Yet I do find some reassurance in contemplating the large-scale cycles of life and death in the universe. Things get broken, then rebuilt anew. Just look up any night and you’ll see it all around you. And there’s more that you can’t see, at least not with your eyes. There are trillions of other planets out there, orbiting trillions of other stars.
Somewhere, maybe, there’s a place where they’ve figured all this out and do things better than we do. And there are probably places where they haven’t. When I look up, I’m looking for the place where they made it. Because if even just one can do it, then maybe so can we. Someday.
