Why People Should Listen to Me

At the tender, callow age of 17, as I was joining a new peer group and tasting the fruit of what would come to be a disastrous young love, I posited to a few friends a wacky, tremendously nerdy and uncool idea of the universe. The universe, I suggested, should be seen as a biosphere on a scale commensurate with its size. Just as we once had no idea that the interaction of solar winds in our ionosphere created the light shows we call the aurorae or that coronal mass ejections could alter animal migratory patterns, we know next to nothing about why nebulae coalesce the way they do or why so few pulsars emit in the gamma-ray spectrum. Fancy-shmancy theoretical models aside, we had (and still have) a long way to go before "understanding" and "universe" should ever be spoken matter-of-factly. I liked my idea of a universe biosphere at the time because it allowed me to think of that celestial sphere as dynamic and possibly influenced by many more factors than I could wrap my measly simain brain around. There have been many nights since when I lay awake thinking about our earth, our sun (Sol), and our galaxy as entities that, owing to their higher-order complexity, must in some way approach consciousness. Italo Calvino helped my musings. I envisioned galactic neighbors exchanging stars the way you and I might swap books we'd like the other to read. At the same time, we made magnificent progress in understanding how our own bodies function and the myriad roles chemicals and proteins play; their dances, eerily enough, were almost celestial themselves. Ribosomes floated through a viscous ether and gleefully churned out the amino chains we need for life just as stars floated through a vacuum and churned up materials that became planets, planetesimals, other stars and who knows what else. Sometimes, biology and astrophysics were so yoked in my head I found it difficult to define one as exterior and one as interior. (Derrida suffered from a similar teleological crisis, methinks) All this is merely some rhetorical buildup to a fascinating little blurb I found on CNN. Seven years later, and my nerdy little supposition gains some aesthetic impetus. Hooray, science; my love for thee is gossamer and gold.