Incredible belief and the vastness of the cosmos

Try to imagine, if you can, what the ancients thought when they looked upon the night sky. Back in the time when there were no street lights to blot out the view and all the colors of the Milky Way shone through a relatively pristine pollution free atmosphere. It had to be a better view than even what you can see out in the desert of Nevada or Arizona today. Imagine those people around just before book writing began, they must have thought ‘who but a god could have made such a thing’ such majestic beauty with an eerie unreal quality about it. You’d think you could almost reach up and grab a star and hold it in your hand. Early Romans thought there was a shell around the world with the stars stuck to the inside of it, or that the stars where just holes in the shell and outside was bright light shining through and if you could build a ladder long enough you could get out there and actually meet the gods.
Yet today we can calculate the positions of all the catalogued stars and major celestial objects and pretty much know their exact distance from the Earth on any given date in the past, and with a few of the more sophisticated home astronomy programs you can enter in a date from the past or distant future and get an accurate look at the sky from a chosen point on the surface of the planet. All this is possible through mathematics, and a lot of hard work on the part of many dedicated scientists and computer programmers of our day. And so we can know what it would look like to some extent (minus the fine detail of gasses and other particles floating in space) at any given time or place. You know it’s not that different looking today than it was around the time of Plato, or Aristotle, or even when the very first symbols or writings were chiseled into a stone or cave wall. The only thing which has really changed is our perception of it, our concept, if you will, of the reasons and causes of what we can perceive today as the Universe.
We have come to know so much of what has happened in the very early formation of the Universe down to minute parts of one second, what is going on now with distant stars and planets, and finally what will likely happen toward the end of time and space as we know it. If the Universe continues to expand at this alarming rate we had calculated, it will eventually spread so thin into the vastness of empty space that proton decay seemed the likely engine of its demise. There would eventually be no galaxies or even light to show them to a living being, if there be any at that point in time anyway. In that epoch the black holes will have sucked up all of the available matter, and they will be the only bodies in the expanding Universe, spreading outward from each other in a dark and unimaginably vast area of space until even they evaporate into nothing, having shed their last decaying proton. Or the expansion slows to a halt after untold billions of years and begins to go the other way for as many more billions of years until the big crunch, the endpoint of time as we know it.
Unfortunately there will not be any sentient beings/humans, or for that matter any living thing at all around to see it or feel it, near the end of a crunch, this is understood. Life will become extinct from mass cataclysmic events caused by gravitational pull as the delicate balance in the galaxies gets stirred up. Yes, it will be a very harsh and violent environment to experience as matter begins to collide and give off tremendous energy, just as it was harsh in the beginning, after all, it took a few billion years here on this average planet for any life to evolve, it should take at least that much, more or less, for it to die out at the end. Current thinking favors the continued expansion, though dark matter needs more evaluation.
The point being that yes, we live in the sweet time, it’s good to be a human being now versus at either extreme point in the formation of this Universe. It’s really a bit of good luck we are here and can ponder these things, but more importantly it is because of all this knowledge we possess we can see there is hardly any room left for the possibility of the supernatural. I give no quarter to silly superstitious belief in Gods or Demons. It is undeniably incredible that any strong belief in the supernatural can exist for anyone possessing access to the full knowledge of the scientific advances in cosmology and quantum physics we have at our fingertips today. Yet there still exists a wide margin of the US population which clings to these wild notions, such as the Earth is only 6500 years old, or to a belief in that UFO’s have been abducting humans for research, or any number of other religious and nonreligious fallacies.
All of this leads me to conclude that we need a national standard for science education in the United States that recognizes the current level of astronomical and scientific knowledge, and enforces it in every state and every school no matter what. This could be accomplished by accepting submissions from every leading university across the country, and forming a scientific governing body which could constantly update and revise teaching standards as new knowledge arises. The governing body could be elected by the universities and monitored by unbiased members of these same universities and other chosen groups of respected scientists within and without the US government. Then let us see if the current level of mass ignorance in this country will decline, I feel that it will if this project is adhered to and administered properly. Of course the question of updating textbooks to reflect new findings seems daunting and costly, but could be overcome with the addition of separate addendums issued in a timely manner in pamphlet form.
Science or anti-science which is it going to be? Something must be done before the next fifty to a hundred years from now, or global warming will decide for us whether we get the luxury of pondering the lofty questions, or merely just surviving against the manmade destruction of the world.

James C. Galli