On a short lesson in history

Each little blue dot is a galaxy of stars like ours. (We are at the center of this cross-sectional splicing.) Ever since my formal education began, I was told that the light coming in from the stars was, in fact, old, stale, and thus full of sequestered, admirable charm. “You are looking into the heart of history itself,” they all would say. While delicately holding on to that fact, I always felt a magnificent desolation towards these bodies of luminescence, whistling with a blade of grass in my mouth while lying on the lawn and drinking in the marvel of it. It wasn’t until recently that I realized how geo or rather ego-centric this thought was. Taking it in reverse, light from us takes time to travel to other places and observers far away can only see us in the past. While standing at the circumference of this circle, an observer would see the earth one billion years ago. Since the beginning of modern man is estimated to be 200 000 years ago, divide this radius by 5000 and it is at this tiny circumference that an onlooker might first witness the first buddings of our civilization.

Thus, there is no useful simultaneity in such a universe; nobody can see the whole thing “now”. Our history literally spreads out around us like ripples in a pond.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.