When we go outside and look up on a clear, dark night, we can see about three thousand
stars swirling over our heads.
It was from this view that for hundreds of centuries, humanity built and framed its understanding
of our place in the universe.
Looking up and seeing the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the stars all of them - every
one - circling around us day after day, year after year, never changing except for the
occasional comet or falling star, it seemed a natural conclusion to make that we lie at
the center of all that is.
After all, why would everything revolve around us if we were not at the center?
Surely this makes us somehow… special?
The notion that we occupy a special place in the cosmos is as old as humanity and remained
essentially unchallenged until Nicolaus Copernicus presented an idea that perhaps everything
did not revolve around us, maybe, just maybe he said, things went around the Sun instead.
With the invention of the telescope, Galileo provided observational evidence to support
Copernicus, and for the first time in thousands of years, humanity began to get a sense that
perhaps the cosmos wasn't as interested in us as we had always imagined.
Human beings come to understand our environment by making observations and then we fill in
the knowledge gaps created by things we can't see directly by making reasonable inferences
to explain what's going on, at least as best we can.
But what may seem obvious and explain our experiences at first, may turn out to have
other explanations that are equally plausible, if not always palatable to our sensibilities.
So it was that that these initial challenges to our place in the universe from Copernicus
and Galileo became a difficult consideration, and - not surprisingly - were resisted.
As time passed and more data came in from ever advancing telescopes and mathematics,
it became uncomfortably obvious that we were not at the center of everything. The Earth
clearly circled the Sun - what's more it wasn't as flat as it appeared at first glance. In
fact, our planet wasn't flat at all.
Our planet, we discovered, orbits the Sun, and is one of seven other bodies that do the same.
Our Sun is one of several hundred billion in a galaxy, and as stars go, it isn't all
that large, bright or hot. All things considered it too, is not very special.
We've also recently learned that every star in our galaxy has on average 1.6 planets in
orbit around it. Some have more, others less. Solar systems, it turns out, are very common
and not that special.
For decades, as late as the 1920s astronomers thought we were the only galaxy in the universe.
An island in an unfathomable void.
Then Edwin Hubble measured variable stars in the Andromeda Nebula and discovered that
it wasn't a nebula at all - it was another galaxy. Alas, our galaxy wasn't very special either.
The final nail in the coffin for the human centrist view of the cosmos came when the
Hubble Deep Field was taken in 1995. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope pointed our
most powerful eyes to a tiny area of empty, unremarkable and starless sky for many days
to see if anything would show up.
Thousands of galaxies filled the image, showing us for the first time that there are little
island universes literally everywhere. Each tiny speck in the image was a galaxy containing
hundreds of billions of stars.
Most recently, and with relatively little fanfare, a new, enthralling look at our cosmos
was released. Astronomers using ground-based telescopes high in the Chilean mountains,
have given us a picture that dwarfs all previous observations taken so far.
Looking in the constellation Sextans and staring for 55 hours, we are shown a look into our
cosmic home like ever before. Constructed from over 6000 individual images, and covering
an area of the sky about eight times that of a full moon, the UltraVISTA Deep Field
contains over 200,000 galaxies. This is the widest and deepest image of it's kind, with
so many galaxies and so many stars, where do we declare the center to be now?
And where do we fit in?
Finding out we don't occupy any special position in the heavens may be crushing to some, and
threatening to our old ideas, but this need not be viewed as a bad thing.
What our discoveries have shown us is that we are part of something larger than ourselves.
We may not be central to Eternity, but it is central to us and our home expands with
each new thing we learn about it.
The actual universe is far richer than anything we could ever have imagined, and our home
has more neighbors than we thought. What's required of us now, is to expand our view
of home, to stop limiting what we call home to just one tiny grain in a cosmic sandbox.
The Earth is one tiny room in an immense mansion of eternity. If we look at our home that way,
then looking up on a clear dark night is never lonely and always full of possibilities.