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A Note to the Granddaughters
Ah! My day is complete. Besides being a most beautiful, sunny, warm, calm, dry day in Dallas-Ft Worth area, I received an advance copy of Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, with a publication date of January 7, 2014.
Last night on the way home from swimming, I was talking to my ten-year-old granddaughter. It was dark and we were looking for the moon. We found the evening star, so the clouds were not an issue, but we didn't find the moon.
I suggested to my granddaughter that the stars would be lonesome "tonight" (last night) -- no moon to talk to. And then we talked about extraterrestrial life. I suggested out loud that it would be very, very lonely to think "we" might be the only life in the universe, this life on earth. I talked to her about The Privileged Planet and how some scientists are coming to the unsettling conclusion that as time goes on and there is no evidence of life anywhere in the universe, "we" may be, in fact, alone.
My granddaughter replied: "Yes, perhaps in this, our, universe, life only occurs on earth. But there are likely many other (parallel) universes."
Ah, yes, I had forgotten about parallel universes.
Chapter 1 in Max Tegmark's book opens immediately with the Schrödinger equation and multiple universes. It's going to be a great book. I will need to read it just to keep up with my granddaughter.
On being alone in the Universe. David Quammen (an exemplary nature writer) in" Monster of God" writes about man as prey and so forth and closes with some haunting thoughts that have stuck with me.
ReplyDeleteHe said that it would be better for us as a species to run into alien predators (of man) than to just forever be alone.
Interesting thought, and it's hard for me to think otherwise (than Quammen). That drive home last night with my granddaughter thinking that we were the only intelligent beings in "this" universe was a very sobering thought.
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