Sight Unseen / Brandon A. Evans

A waste of space

In the movie Contact, the main character, Ellie, recalls a memory of her father where she asks him whether or not he thinks there is life on other worlds.

“I don’t know,” he replies. “But I guess I’d say if it is just us … seems like an awful waste of space.”

The line sets the groundwork for the rest of the movie, and it sticks with the viewer because the insight is so sharp.

How many look up at the wilderness of stars beyond our moon and shiver—at least a little bit—at the terrifying thought that there is no one else but us?

Conversely, how many aren’t at least a little excited that some distant planet circling a distant sun could be inhabited by lost brothers and sisters just beyond our reach?

Of all the wonders of the cosmos, intelligent life is the crown jewel. Each person is a new world onto themselves: infinite and vast; a treasure beyond compare or replication.

“We are a way for the universe to know itself,” astronomer and popular writer Carl Sagan once said.

Nature possesses an entirely new dimension of meaning because our consciousness is a part of it.

And what’s more, God made us to seek each other out; to form and live in a communion that will one day be perfected in heaven.

Why wouldn’t we want more of that?

And how could there be 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and a trillion galaxies beyond that without something to show for it?

To the modern mind, it’s a frigid and frightening thought that so many worlds unseen are as sterile and lonely as the rings of Saturn.

It does seem like such a waste.

Or is it?

The rings of Saturn may be sterile but they are not a waste: they are a wonder.

Our ancestors looked at the sky and saw that same wonder. For them, the beauty of those pinpoint lights was enough. There didn’t need to be any other purpose to it than God’s glory and our delight.

Need we think so differently, just because we know how much bigger everything is? How much more complex and detailed and diverse it all is?

It’s one thing to believe in the likelihood that intelligent life exists somewhere else, but a whole other thing to say that the rest of the universe would be a waste if there isn’t.

Nothing is wasted with God, and his ways are not our ways.

All those galaxies are but the tiniest exercise of his creativity. They are a divine extravagance.

The universe could be twice as big—a thousand times as big—and it would be no matter to God. He easily holds the entirety of it in place—every atom and photon and speck of dust, all in balance and all accounted for.

We needn’t be scared if we are, in the end, “all there is.” The sky is a symphony of light—a painting 13 billion light years wide. Such beauty isn’t there to be a terror to us, but a solace.

The universe requires no meaning beyond that. God the Father is recklessly generous enough to have made all of it just as he would a bouquet of flowers.

If so, then what a wonderful waste of space.
 

(Sight Unseen is an occasional column that explores God and the world. Brandon A. Evans is the online editor and graphic designer of The Criterion and a member of St. Susanna Parish in Plainfield.)†