| Stars are born, they live and they die. Filling the night sky like beacons in an ocean of darkness, they have guided our thoughts over the millennia to the secure harbor of reason. It was in the attempt to understand the motion of stars and planets that the human mind first grasped the idea of natural law. But the stars are more than objects for scientific investigation. Like the sun and the moon, they are embedded in our unconsciousness — we sense their presence even if we do not see them. Arrayed in an apparently random pattern in the sky, the stars provide a perfect screen for the projection of our feelings. In that pattern, ancient priests and poets saw the figures of myth and nature; the stars were gods — archetypes of permanence in an impermanent world. Compared with human life or the life of nations and empires, stars appear to live forever, indifferent to the passions of our existence. Yet somehow we feel that in spite of the immense distances which separate us from all stars save our sun, the destiny of humanity is profoundly intertwined with them. We hope that life on earth may share in the permanence of the stars, the galaxies and the universe itself. Whether that hoped-for permanence is no more than a projection upon the heavens of our modern myth of progress and therefore, like the ancient projections of the figures of myth, also an illusion, time will tell. The stars, like the gods they once represented, continue to play with our deepest feelings. ... Ancient people worshiped the sun as the source of life. In the future, as our knowledge of stellar systems grows, we may learn that planetary life is part of the evolution of a star system. Stars create the conditions for life and so we are bonded to them. But the stars themselves are not eternal, independent beings; they are the progeny of the galaxy. Their life, and hence ours, is intertwined with galactic processes occurring on time scales that are incomprehensible from a human perspective. Yet, viewed from a great temporal perspective, no part of the universe is truly independent of the whole. Is it not possible that just as the environment on earth has shaped life here on time scales of millions of years, the environment of the universe will shape the future of life on time scales of billions of years? Life may find that the whole universe becomes the stage of its existence. Is our destiny among the stars? Or is such a starry vision of our future but an illusion reflected endlessly in the mirrors of our mind? | — Heinz R Pagels, Perfect Symmetry - The Search for the Beginning of Time | Indexes/04 |
1 comments:
Their daily life, therefore, we, the Milky Way is intertwined with the course of time scale is incomprehensible, from the human point of view.
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