Two dots. That’s really all the image the New Horizons probe sent back looked like, if we’re honest. It was supposed to be the little robot’s first color picture of the dwarf planet Pluto and its moon Charon. But let’s be real: It was a big dot and a little dot. An emoji from space.
So why, then, does seeing that picture resonate inside your soul like a bass chord through a really good subwoofer?
It might be the sheer technical achievement. A machine human beings built a decade ago and heaved into space the only way they knew how is emailing pics to its masters at mission control. That’s hard. Building a camera to survive a 5 billion mile trip through hard vacuum and cosmic radiation is the kind of thing engineers justifiably swagger about.
Or it could be the science. Owing mostly to its distance, Pluto and its moons—the entire Kuiper Belt of orbiting objects of which Pluto is a part, in fact—are mysteries. Unlike the planets, Pluto orbits the sun off the ecliptic, eccentrically swinging through the plane of the solar system. All astronomers know about it is that it’s cold, dark, and far. One of New Horizons' jobs will be to identify geographic—plutographic?—features so people can name them. Imagine that: An entire world so unknown that its mountains and valleys have no names. Pluto incognito.
Any new data, then, expands what humanity knows about the universe. But there's something more to New Horizons' deliveries than pure technical or scientific achievement---the fleeting excitement of a job well done and a question definitively answered.
One common stereotype of scientists is the Spock model, the idea that people who go into science are cold, logical types—that in fact the only way to do good science is to be dispassionate. That’s wrong, of course. The only way to do good science (and to understand it) is to be passionate. The best scientists have what Evelyn Fox Keller famously called “a feeling for the organism,” a comprehension of their subject so deep that they know how it works even if they can’t articulate it.
Scientists operate at the edge of knowledge, at the edge of understanding. They see a universe not incomprehensible in its awesomeness but utterly, purely comprehensible—at least, eventually. Uncountable quintillions of invisible subatomic particles stretching infinitely in every direction, including directions our brains didn’t evolve to process … and it all somehow coalesces into everything, into blue skies and stars and chocolate milkshakes and patriotism and bullet trains and good books and love. Science tries to figure out the how while exalting the what.
When we humans see an image of a distant planet (minor planet, but still) hanging on the infinite vault, we are seeing the outside edge of everything people have ever known.
Really, that ought to frighten us. Every time something human beings built pushes outward into the universe—or inward, into our own cells—it’s like walking into an unfamiliar room with the lights off. We don’t know what’s there. We don’t know if we’re alone. We don’t know if it’s dangerous. And we respond by … building something else that pushes farther. We turn on the lights. We get a magnifying glass and look around. We map the room, image it at a microscopic scale, and then see what’s in the next room. We proceed, chasing knowledge of ourselves and our place in the universe.
When an image crosses your screen like those two Plutonian dots, or, say, a real-time scan of a knuckle cracking, you marvel at it because you are seeing the lights coming on in the room as it happens. This is where the action is, because it proves you have the hubris to try to understand the how the universe works. In the dance track of discovery, this is the drop.
This week saw another set of results from space scientists. A team of astronomers lead by Penn State researcher Jason Wright announced the outcome of a survey of 100,000 distant galaxies. They were looking for energy emissions, particularly in a part of the spectrum called the middle-infrared. Five decades ago the physicist Freeman Dyson hypothesized that a star-faring intelligent species eventually would cocoon stars in complete spheres to capture 100 percent of their energy. After a while they’d spread out, over billions of years, and colonize the entire galaxy. Such a galaxy, in which nearly every star was wrapped in a Dyson sphere, would emit relatively little visible light but lots of heat. So that’s what Wright’s team went looking for.
They found a whole lotta nothing. A few galaxies had some weird emissions that Wright reportedly plans to follow up on, but overall it doesn’t seem like the universe harbors any galactic empires. At least, no galactic empires that behave the way Dyson and the researchers who followed him predicted. Maybe they build something even weirder than Dyson spheres.
The point is, Wright’s negative results don’t mean we humans are alone in the universe any more than New Horizon’s pictures of Pluto mean that it is just another icy chunk of rock spinning through an uncaring universe. Think of all this in a more quantum-zen way. None of it would matter if human beings weren’t here to think it mattered, if you see what I mean. We look toward the edges of the universe and our own knowledge in amazement not because we seek our own limits, but because we want to learn how to go past them.
