Progress, and the Complexity of the Cosmos

A MERE ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago, nobody knew why stars shine, what they are made of, and it was believed that what we call "the milky way" comprised the entire universe. Those hundreds of little smudges looked suspiciously like condensation on the telescope glass.

I'm fifty seven, my mother is ninety two; each day a hundred years seems a less prodigious length of time. Now, we have sent space probes all over the solar system, roamed around on the moon and mars,  those little smudges have multiplied into the billionsand become complete galaxies external to our own milky way, and astronomers have stopped scrubbing their telescopes.

So on we go, and the state of the art is that this immense of expanse of smudges has been resolved into trillions of stars, while the stars in the milky way  are seen to have planets of their own. We the people have traced the history of the universe all the way back to within a microsecond of its beginning. Before that is still a msytery, and we still do not know how or by whom the universe was created, but, we're working on it. Pretty incredible stuff.

The newest thing is parallel, alternate universes. Some of us think that new universes come popping out of black holes, universes of which we are entirely currently unaware, and the number of possible physical dimensions has grwon from three to eleven, and counting, through what is called "string theory", expanding upon  quantum mechanics, the subatomic science pioneered by neils bohr in which every particle of matter in the cosmos is seen as being in many places simultaneously. So much for the old adage about being unable to be in two places at the same time.

Olaf Stapleton, a visionary science fiction writer, said : "Whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating many...distinct histories of the cosmos. Since in every evolutionary sequence of the cosmos there were many creatures, and each was constantly faced with many possible courses (of action), and the combinations of all their courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence."

In other words, it looks like there is a lot of stuff going on, more than we very recently imagined. Here's looking forward to seeing you around - in a lotta different places.