BLOG/WRITING

'My God, it's not full of stars...'

I've often liked to think of drawing, which of course involves taking the time to look intensely at form and space from a human perspective, is a a conduit to critical thinking. This is in good part because if we draw a lot we very soon discover that what we perceive with our eyes is not the same as what is seen with a camera, despite the eyes structure being very similar to a camera. What we think we see is not a wholly reliable source of information. We learn by countless hours of especially observational drawing, which involves careful and intense 'looking, that what cameras 'see' or capture is often vastly different from what is perceived before us. Drawing makes us...well it certainly made me...have less trust in what I think I see. I'll probably do a number of future posts that deal with this notion in various ways.

The title of this post, of course, alludes to what astronaut David Bowman exclaims when he enters The Stargate, not in the movie, which is sublimely silent except for mounting ethereal choral music, but in the novel by Arthur C. Clarke based on his own screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's film. In the book, which I read decades ago and don't have on hand so can't actually check, so am relying on Google...Bowman says 'My God, it's full of stars.' Actually what he says in full is "The thing's hollow -- it goes on forever -- and -- oh my God! -- it's full of stars!" And that's generally how we think of the universe; full of stars. We think that because that's what we see when, without light pollution, we look into the night sky, and even bring to bear binoculars or telescopes (camera devices) on small sections of the sky, bringing even greater numbers of stars into view. And in fact, the deeper we zoom into space (and therefore time) the more and more stars and other even larger and further celestial objects emerge into view, allegedly going back to shortly after the Big Bang, when the universe first began lighting up, in one wavelength or another. Closer stars might still exist; further stars no longer exist, their light is only just arriving billions of years later. So, by looking up from a location without light pollution, or from telescope photography, we are easily convinced the universe is full of stars. This conviction of a universe brimming with stars is further fortified by our reading of science fiction, or viewing of it in films, which are fairy tales of sorts, in which interstellar civilizations are regularly conjured up, along with vast populations of multiple species of intelligent technological aliens. The number of stars in the observable universe is truly staggering, even more staggering than we can actually imagine, and beyond what is observable are staggeringly larger numbers forever denied our viewing because of the inflation of space. Our comprehension of numbers...mine anyway...unravels in terms of comprehension similar to this; one to ten (when I run out of observable fingers), then ten to one hundred (I could once count to 100 without losing my train of thought)...then proceeding to uncountable 'lots'...to even less estimable massive amounts...then to incomprehensible quantities (incomprehensible to me)...despite the mathematical devices to make them workable, like exponents. The Drake Equation, which takes these enormous numbers of stars and therefore presumably planets in our galaxy, attempts through equation inputs, to come up with a probabilistic number of planets with life, intelligent life, and civilizations. It's a thought experiment, and it depends how enthusiastic you are with numbers, or with the possibility of emergence of life and technological civilizations on other planets (bear in mind that on Earth, life started almost immediately after, heck, possibly even before the cooling of the planet). Whatever numbers/probabilities you punch into Drake's equation, low or high, surprising results are yielded, and it is easy to imagine a galaxy teeming with not just stars but inhabited planets and technological civilizations. (Of course, if this is the case, for technological civilizations, where are they? This is The Fermi Paradox, another wonderful device that asks a simple question, 'where are the aliens'). The Drake Equation, and results distilled from running it, also provide a felt sense of the staggering number of stars in the sky. Finally, recently this impression has been further fortified with space telescopes; first the Hubble and now the Webb. We can now find photos of the tiniest of tracts of the night sky that are almost white with stars, and can infer that every part of the sky would be similarly populated. Indeed, it seems that if we could see far enough into space with a long enough exposure the night sky would be pure white. Everything we see and hear about space points to a universe chock-a-block full of celestial objects.

Obviously the title of this posts suggests I'm suspicious. As an artist I know that what I think I see and am stimulated to visually imagine/infer isn't necessarily as things are. I've been deluded by my own eyes many times...actually I'm deluded by my brain which constructs what I perceive from what my eyes see. Only by careful observation, through drawing, have I had a different visual reality revealed to me. As well as observing form I study space. I know how focusing in on, cropping, 'zooming in' alters visual reality. It's been a tool to attempt to create dramatic landscapes, and is a device that photographers use regularly to tell visual lies, for example, for travel brochures. I know how the relationships between various objects embedded in three dimensional space can be altered by projecting them on to a two dimensional surface (or imagined one), which is what I often do when drawing and measuring angles and proportions to transfer to my paper. I know how depth of field can be contracted to almost non existence. In the vacuum of space, if no one can hear you scream, light nevertheless travels incomprehensibly long distances.

Above, Sergei Eisenstein allegedly used the Odessa Steps, which have a 'forced perspective'...narrower at the top than bottom to shoot the massacre scene to make the Czar's troops at the top appear subtly larger than life. Allegedly The Emperor Justinian, in his basilica in Constantinople, employed a similar technique. The basilica was less high and less wide at his end, so that when supplicants arrived through the entrance at the opposite end, the forced perspective suggested that Justinian, raised on his dais, was larger than life.

Above, the Ames Room Illusion, in which a single viewpoint of an asymmetrically distorted room in which people who are actually far apart appear to be at the same level of pictorial depth. Forcing perspective is one way of altering perception to convince you that what you see is something different than reality.

Above, a couple of my own quick in-class sketches made whilst demonstrating perspective grids to show how 'zooming in' through cropping, can make far-away objects like the mountains appear to loom over the foreground.

Above, the same effect used by a photographer on a day with clear atmospheric conditions (little or no aerial/atmospheric perspective) uses a zoom lens to bring distant objects, like icebergs, up close. This is a highly distorting device used by photographers in, for example, travel brochures, which could make an uninteresting hotel or community seem closer to a distant place of interest.

When teaching, I used to devote time to the lies that our vision, and cameras, propagate. I'd give examples of different camera views (upshots and downshots), different vanishing points on perspective grids, examples of altering the relationships of objects in space. If I were still teaching now I'd start with the universe, and the assumptions that we might be inclined to make about it; that it is teeming with stars. Because, as you know, I'm not just suspicious about this notion, but know that if we frame our field of vision differently the perception will be 'My God, it's not full of stars...' 

In order to re-frame my notion of the universe I wondered how...let's start with our galaxy...might appear if an average sun/star were the size of a grain of sand. I Googled 'if our sun was a grain of sand...' and discovered of course, I'm not the only person who has wondered this. The conjecture is apparently epidemic in science classes. 

So, if suns in general were the size of a grain of sand, there are various napkin calculations available, that all more or less suggest awesomeness in the original sense of the word. There's apparently about 100 billion starts in our galaxy, the Milky Way, so, how much sand would that represent? Apparently half a tennis course 1 meter high of sand. That is an astonishing amount of sand, and we would be justified in thinking that, yes, our galaxy and universe is teeming with stars. But lets spread those stars/grains of sand out to real distances. Lets collapse the astonishing depth of field that astronomical photography represents. If the sun were a grain of sand, our solar system might be 3.5 meters across, or 30 km across depending on where we define the boundary and how big we define a grain of sand. If our sun were a grain of sand our Milky Way galaxy would be 350,000 km across. So imagine the sand representing stars in the galaxy on that half tennis course scattered about on a disc 350,000 km wide. Sand/matter becomes incredibly diffuse.  

For me, the universe has potentially become a lot emptier. The various answers to 'where are the aliens', The Fermi Paradox, is altered radically in terms of probabilities. Answers that I might have bet a little bit of money on I no longer would. It seems likely the aliens simply can't be found in space...and also time...which is dimensionally as preposterously, staggeringly, large as space itself. Trying to locate aliens, or have them locate us, would be more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack.  The shocking revelation of how vast and almost empty our galaxy is makes me question how feasible communication over vast distances might be, even if we found another needle in the haystack and acquired the energy and technology to beam interstellar communications, a potentially dangerous thing to do considering we would know nothing about the nature of the recipients. And interstellar travel also becomes a more distant possibility than even some of the more distant stars. The likelihood that we have been, or are being, visited by aliens, seems not impossible but nevertheless inconceivably remote and makes all the various popular past and present claims seem not just unlikely but almost absurd. Even if there are billions of alien civilizations across time and space we might as well be alone. This is probably all there is. This is probably all we have. The here and the now. At the very least this scenario becomes so likely we should be very careful with what we have and proceed with caution into the future because if we destroy ourselves no one might ever know we even existed.

It's drawing that made me think about the universe like this.