Loneliness is Pointless

The absolute silence dominated my routine jog this morning along an empty path, with the rising sun as my only companion. I was struck by how lonely we can be in the company of physical objects, even as magnificent as this giant fusion reactor situated 8.33 light-minutes away. This sense of loneliness with a lack of spiritual purpose reverberates throughout the cosmos. Near the end of his book “The First Three Minutes”, the distinguished physicist Steven Weinberg, noted: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

To recognize the level by which physical reality bites, let us recap some well-known facts. No human lived for more than one part in a hundred million of the time that elapsed since the Big Bang. Our news cycle is consumed by what happens on our terrestrial rock, a residue containing three millionths of the mass of the Sun — which was born in the last third of cosmic history. Our star, which enables all forms of life-as-we-know-it, contains merely a trillionth of the mass of the Milky Way galaxy, which by itself makes a part in ten billion of the mass enclosed within the observable volume of the Universe. To add insult to injury, the remarkable uniformity of the cosmic microwave background, left over from the Big-Bang, implies that there is no edge to the cosmos at least out to a distance 4,000 times bigger than our cosmic horizon.

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