Luminous Astrobio
Timefulness, Spacefulness, and How Asking Ourselves About Aliens Might Make Us Live for Tomorrow
In the hubbub of common affairs, most of us go about our days entirely missing out on how incredible it really is to simply be alive. It’s so easy to take this all for granted. More than that, many people seem utterly unaware of how connected we really are to each other, to our world, and to the universe around us.
I’m not going to rant here about why we should all be practicing a bit more mindfulness and finding some presence (we should be) — instead I want to share a few ways that we really are all connected, and why thinking like an astrobiologist could be important for how we think about the present moment in our civilization.
Stuck in a Noisy Loop
Many of us tend to go about our days, day in and day out, moving from one place to another, having minimal thoughts about what those movements or those places really mean in the context of the universe. It’s so easy to fill ourselves with junk food, splurge on streaming services so as to not miss out on some current show, scroll mindlessly on social media feeds (they build the platforms with the intention of keeping your attention), and defocus ourselves from the art of living. Too many people are in continual pain from having real human emotions but never really acknowledging or deeply understanding those emotions.
It's so easy to forget how to find meaning in it all.
Sometimes it almost seems like most people are just living in noise. Stuck in loops that make it easier to go about their lives without sensing the signals that are available to them.
It’s too easy to miss the bigger picture of our place in the universe — we are an amalgamation of matter derived from the Big Bang, from nuclear fusion inside of stars, from stellar explosions and neutron star mergers, from particles colliding in space and our atmosphere, and even form nuclear bomb testing. We each contain some number of atoms that were in nearly every other human being who ever lived. We bear trillions of other organisms within our bodies and on our skin. We are descendants of a biosphere that has evolved and adapted dynamically with this little rock in space through nearly 4 billion years. We have developed the tools and technologies to explore our world and the space beyond, to launch robots and living things into the near space environment, to travel to other worlds, and now to look for signs of life on worlds far away.
We are so much more than the 24-hour news cycle, influencer culture, political propaganda, outrage porn, and our evolved addictive behaviors that are so easily used to control us.
As the Jedi Master, Yoda, remarked to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, “luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”
While I would argue that our “crude matter” is actually rather incredible (more to come on that), there’s so much more that we have to experience and to share in what we experience that illuminates our place in the cosmos. We are luminous beings!
Limitations in Time and Space
We evolved as a primate species to think in scales of time and space that are very convenient to our own biology. Our distant ancestors only really needed to think of things that were roughly as big as us, maybe as small as a snake or as big as a mammoth, but not too much bigger or smaller. They only really needed to consider time spans of the recent past — their own memories of living — and have just enough imagination to place themselves into a near future. All of that alone takes a lot of brain power, and our ancestors certainly needed to conserve much of their strengths for the act of finding food, mating, and avoiding predators.
There’s so much to be thankful for in regard to the biological tools our ancestors developed. Imagination and language were certainly among the key highlights in the development of our species that allowed us to come to where we have now. But thanks to our imagination and language, and our many millennia of developing science and philosophy, we also now have the ability to see that our minds were simply not built to think in scales of time and space that are well beyond us.
A human can see a small fly in the air or a nut on the ground in front of us. We can see into the distance to roughly make out a distant forest or mountain, though we can't resolve things well at much more than a few tens of meters away. We evolved to see the here and now, even if we aren't even very good at thinking in the here and now. Our minds pivot from one moment to the next, and even now that we've learned so much about our place here on Earth, many of us still spend so much of our time worrying over the immediate past or dreading the immediate future.
Even those of us who have actively trained in thinking in other scales — learning through science about the subatomic realm of the smallest things we can observe with microscopes or the vastness of space between humongous nebulae and other galaxies that we can spy with our telescopes — will still find challenge in truly understanding how small or big these things are. We often have to use analogies to make sense of them for our minds to even begin to comprehend.
Of course, one day, we may find out how to augment our current capabilities. Either through engaging some part of our biology we don't currently understand or through using gene editing and technological augmentation. We're already seeing the beginning of that now.
Timefulness and Spacefulness
There's a rather grand view of life and our place in the cosmos that comes from our scientific studies and our shared millennia of actively learning — a view that comes with its own cosmic grandeur and the full depths of awe that we can experience throughout our entire being when we are living fully.
Beyond taking time to be present with ourselves, to sit in silence and be aware of our thoughts, to meditate on our lives and our being, we can also train ourselves to think just a little bit more about our place in time and in space. I’d argue that studying realms like geology, cosmology, and astrobiology can bring us a greater sense of awe, and maybe even make us better people.
One of the greatest reasons to explore what we know and can still learn in realms like geology and paleobiology is through developing our timefulness — our sense of our place in time.
The word timefulness is one that I first read as used by Marcia Bjornerud in her book of the same name. She speaks of studying geology as a means for better understanding our place in time. A meditation on where we fit into the scale of geological processes. (Admittedly, though, I wasn’t a fan of her disdain for astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life in her introduction.)
Thinking like a geologist, you have to look across a landscape and sense how it changed through time. Not just some changes in vegetation or movements of a stream meander, but everything. The history of the rock below your feet. The processes of mountain building and land erosion, soil development through biological action and processes of mass wasting through floods and landslides. You have to have a sense of shifting topographies and tectonic actions. It makes you think about how it all works.
But we can think even deeper in time and to how we fit into the universe by also thinking a bit like cosmologists and astrophysicists. Maybe we can also train in “spacefulness”.
Our best knowledge right now tells us that some 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was born — giving us a whole lot of something from nothing. We honestly have no way (yet) of knowing if there was anything before that. In the first few minutes after our universe found its origination, so many things happened. The four fundamental forces of physics — gravitation, electromagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear forces — began operating separately. Annihilation of matter and antimatter ran rampant until matter won out in the cosmic battle. Subatomic particles formed and then began interacting. The earliest nuclides — atomic nuclei with no bound electrons — formed. The earliest protons and neutrons turned into most of the hydrogen, helium, and lithium in the universe. Eventually electrons were able to join with nuclides — atoms were born! Practically the basis of everything formed in the first few minutes and then matter began clumping across space and time.
Stars were born, galaxies were formed, and the cosmic furnaces that drive the production of the chemical elements began turning hydrogen and helium into carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, iron, and larger and larger elements.
The production of new atomic nuclei (and thus new chemical elements) from protons and neutrons and other nuclei is called “nucleosynthesis” (probably one of my favorite words in all of science). Big Bang nucleosynthesis led to all of the hydrogen within our bodies. If you suck in some helium from a balloon to hear your voice squeak, you’re sucking in some helium that formed at the beginning of time. When stars process the material inside of them through nuclear fusion, the process of stellar nucleosynthesis occurs. When some stars explode through supernovae, then supernova nucleosynthesis creates a huge number of new elements.
Nucleosynthesis allows for all of the chemical elements, themselves allowing for interstellar dust and cosmic debris to build up and start creating minerals, rocks, and planets when new star systems are born.
We now know of over 5000 planets out there in the cosmos, but that’s only an extremely small and limited sampling of what must surely exist. There may be hundreds of billions and even trillions of planets in our galaxy alone. And our galaxy is just one of many hundreds of billions of galaxies that we’ve inferred to exist based on what we know currently of the space far away.
We don’t yet know exactly when and how life started on Earth (and it’s very likely that we’ll never know), but we do know that sometime early in our planet’s history — life happened to this world.
Whether life started somewhere else and then came here or started here — perhaps around a hydrothermal vent on an ocean floor or around a hot spring system somewhere on the surface — life happened.
Looking back into the rock record we can see the history of life gradually becoming more pronounced and also slowly beginning to interact with the planet in a dynamic way. The planet’s surface, near subsurface, and lower atmosphere are dominated by life, and the processes of life have chemically and physically altered these outer regions of the planet. Our world is alive.
Training ourselves to think a little bit about our place in space and in time may not help us solve our immediate problems, but it could go a long way to enlightening us as we consider how to best address such problems.
About Aliens
Thinking about our place in space and time — within the history and also the future of our world and the universe — has the potential to shift our perspective. It can open our eyes to what might really matter at the end of the day. For myself, it has helped me in realizing that a few extra minutes stuck in traffic, the mean comment left on some social media post by someone else, the pain from stubbing my toe on the stairs by my office… Most of the perceived assaults are actually rather trivial.
There is of course real hurt in our world. There are real problems that we must face. But if we’re constantly lost in emotional reaction to the issues that don’t actually matter, it takes away from our capabilities to address the issues that do.
This all brings me to the consideration of alien life.
Based on our current knowledge, we have to admit that we could be alone. We have not yet found any sufficient evidence for the existence of alien life (even if some people believe strongly that we have or that some such evidence is somehow being secreted away by nefarious state actors). But given the sheer scales of space and time that we have the capability to imagine, and given our knowledge already of how many worlds certainly exist (and how many more most likely do because of that), it very much feels like there must be something else or someone else out there.
The more that we learn about life, the more it seems vanishingly unlikely for us to be alone.
If we are not alone, then there may be a myriad of inhabited worlds out there in the cosmos. If life can happen more than once, then it seems that the number of biospheres should be far, far greater than just two.
Perhaps among the many biospheres that could exist, there are even some fraction who’ve evolved to a point similar to us in developing civilizations and advanced technologies. Perhaps even more advanced.
It’s a fun thought exercise to try to run the clock out differently on an alien world. How would evolution function differently? Could there be many different forms and functions for life? Are there some things that evolution has converged upon often? If there are alien civilizations, have they developed their own forms of language, mathematics, science, music, art, culture, religion, philosophy, and more? Have they started sending robots or biological beings into space? Have they peered out into the cosmos to look for us just as much as we’re looking for them? Have they gone even further in their development to becoming multiplanetary, interstellar, or something even more?
These are the kinds of questions that have led to some fun science fiction stories for us to tell.
However, I also argue that these kinds of questions about alien civilizations, and, in particular, questions about them that relate to where we are and the problems we face, are thought experiments in how to build a better future here on Earth.
Have there been alien civilizations who’ve faced the same problems we have? Have they developed through tribalism and competition a warring nature, much as we have? Have they developed nuclear fission, not just as a technology for energy generation but as a technology for mass destruction? Have they conceived of bioweapons, state propaganda, and genocide? Have they come to a point in their own history where they realize that the continued technological development of their civilization has impacted their world through changes in atmospheric chemistry, impacting geological processes, industrial pollution, driving mass migrations and extinctions, and other impacts?
If alien civilizations have faced these kinds of issues much as we are facing them now, are there some who’ve managed to find real and lasting solutions? Can we envision what it might take for us to follow in that path and not another trajectory that might lead to our ultimate demise as a species?
So much is changing drastically right now in the course of human affairs. Our technology is developing at rates that people even a century ago may have had a hard time imagining. Our realization of the impacts of climate change and pollution make it all too apparent (no matter the level of political denial) that we are greatly altering our world, for better or for worse. We now face a future where we might live much longer, healthy lives thanks to scientific achievement. We may soon all be interacting with AI systems on a regular basis, perhaps even more than we do with other humans. The future is now. And now is the time to embrace it, act to make it better, and take the steps that we can imagine some alien civilizations having taken to ensure their existence.
Thinking like astrobiologists can be an exercise in training for civilizational longevity.
Our explorations of the origins of life, life’s history on Earth, and looking for life beyond are important steps in better coming to understand our place in the universe. But we can also use thought experiments in astrobiology to help us frame our problems and consider real, long-term solutions to those problems.
Luminous beings are we. Thoughtful beings we can be. And better for each other and future generations we should be.