Whatever you do, don't look up

 Perhaps one of the most unsettling and life-altering experiences which a person may experience involves an empty field at night. Instead of letting their gaze wander over the ground, or use a torch to light up the path in front of them, they let their eyes adapt to the faint light before they raise their gaze towards the sky.

Assuming it is a largely cloudless night, the lack of the deceiving effect of refraction and scattering, from when light from our nearby star blasts the atmosphere above us, will be most apparent. Instead of a shade of blue or grey, our gaze is instead met with pitch-black darkness. As we keep looking, slowly our eyes can resolve more and more features in the night sky. Until suddenly the Universe opens right in front of our eyes.

The experience of looking up at the night sky and seeing countless stars, the Milky Way and so much more is a special one. It's not unlike when an astronaut during a space walk takes a moment to look away from the Earth and sees this endless expanse of the Universe right in front of them. And you, as the watcher, just a very small part of it.


This will often come with the realisation both of insignificance and that the only place where we humans can realistically live in this Universe is within this narrow sliver of a biosphere on a planet in a remote and mostly barren part of the Milky Way. Even so, our imagination may begin to wander after such an experience, questioning whether maybe humankind will be able to venture into the depths of not just our solar system, but also beyond.

Although we have looked at many features we can discern in the night sky, and we have sent a number of spacecraft equipped with powerful sensors and cameras to take a closer look at the rest of our solar system, there are still so many questions that are left unanswered to this day. Perhaps the most pressing of which is whether we are truly alone in the Universe.


It might be that there truly is no other life in this part of the Milky Way, and maybe not even planets which would be suitable for humankind to live on. All of these are sobering thoughts, but yet it's also essential to remember that all of this is speculation. It hasn't been more than about a century since we gained the ability to really take a look at nearby planets in great detail, the feat of which resulted in the dispelling of many fantastic ideas and hopes for what these worlds might look like.

In the sobering shade cast by those decades, the notion that the Universe out there would be teeming with civilisations much like our own would seem rather preposterous. Mars nor Venus are home to prospering civilisations, but are hellscapes in their own right, either blasted by radiation or baked by enormous temperatures and pressure.

Is there another welcoming home for us humans out there, or will we be spreading out into the quiet darkness of space, carving out niches where we can, but never truly belonging anywhere but on Earth?


All of this is just idly speculation and vague questioning, of course. The only way to figure out the answers to those questions is to face the challenge head-on, to develop better and faster ways to explore the secrets of the Universe. While nobody is forcing us to do so, the very human trait of curiosity does.

Such are the dangers of looking into the depths of the Galaxy itself: the hazards of which have led for thousands of years to people questioning the nature of this Earth, what is out there, humanity's role in its functioning and inevitably the meaning of it all. While the point of our actions on this planet would often seem questionable indeed, there can be little arguing about the statement that for humanity to truly learn its role in the Universe, it will have to look for these answers out there.


Keep looking up.


Maya