Tim Disney

QOTD #3 - Universe - Wilson

When people come to understand how big the universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it’s a shout of joy…for most of us it’s a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence. – Robert Charles Wilson Spin

To borrow the line from Hitchhiker’s Guide, space is big. Really big. So big it’s pretty much impossible for our minds to comprehend how big it actually is.

Wilson’s characters in Spin are confronted with immensity in both time and space. The basic premise is that the earth is wrapped up in a temporal field which causes time to slow down on earth. For each second that passes on earth, ~3 years pass in the outside universe. This means that within a generation the universe will age 4 billion years.

There have been few SF book that dealt with immense time, it’s mostly about the vast distances of space. Wilson is able to play with some fascinating ideas like using time to terraform mars (send over a few bacteria, allow evolution to work over a few million years and presto! A livable world within a few time dilated earth years) or the immanent destruction of earth (within a human lifespan the sun will expand to consume the earth).

Wilson’s characters are forced to deal with the immensity of the universe. As the quote alludes, some of them respond with shouts of joy (one character devotes his life to understanding and dealing with the spin) and others with a cry of terror (another character winds up in a dangerous christian millennial cult). But respond they must in the face of the immanent immensity of the cosmos.

What is fascinating to me is that even though our conception of the universe has expanded so quickly (it wasn’t until the 1920s that we started to realize the universe was bigger than our galaxy) our ability to deal with its immenseness has not. To a certain extent this makes sense, the immediate here and now is more pressing, but I believe that our smallness and the universe’s bigness should inform how we live our lives in the here and now.

Carl Sagan can put it better than me: