It struck me as funny, the day of the eclipse last month, watching Totality race across the country on TV and looking up at the sliver of Partiality in Park City. I thought how special we must be.
Days before, I saw the perfect crescent moon rising before dawn, racing unknowingly to its new-moon rendezvous with the sun, unaware of its effect on the scurrying humanity below. All of us were looking forward to a higher universal perspective, human bonding experiences, or something else to do.
This random, light wave-particle bending confluence seemed inevitable by then, and I was amazed that years ahead of time, science could predict its conjugation to within a second. Two seemingly independent celestial objects on their gravitational orbital dance with destiny. It was special.
Is it a coincidence that the sun is 400 times as big as the moon but 400 times farther away, giving us the perfect eclipse geometry? I think not. There are no coincidences in nature’s design of the universe. It all has a mathematically balanced plan.
There are in fact several moons around dozens of planets around millions of stars in billions of galaxies, and that is just in the universe that we know of today. There are, realistically, billions of eclipses going on in the universe at any given moment. In the trillions of places to live out there, the probability that there is not life on one of them is almost zero.
If there is an eclipse happening out there, and there is no one to see it, is it really that special?
We are separated from each other, in this vast universe, by the current Einsteinian limitation that nothing goes faster than the speed of light except, oddly enough, the expansion of the universe. So we are separated by great distances and the speed limit of light, which is 186,000 miles a second, or 700 million miles an hour, or 6 trillion miles a year. Wicked fast.
According to our current physics, if you stood on one of the closest stars today and looked back at the Earth, you would see the light from the 2002 Olympics in Park City. If you were on one of our closest galaxies and looked back at the Earth, you would see the dinosaurs 66 million years ago and smoking volcanoes at Kettly Junction.
Light is really fast, but the universe is really big. And getting bigger. Someday we will see no stars because they are receding so quickly.
Even if there is life out there, they could not get here if they wanted to. We are protected from them, and they us, by our own isolation and the speed limit of light. Either there is a lot of life out there in the universe that just cannot get here from there, or we are really, really, really, really special. The Garden of Eden special. As special as the dark side of the moon or a total eclipse of the sun.
Matthew Lindon is a Snyderville resident.