We made it along to the American Museum of Natural History this afternoon and headed straight for the Planetarium for a mind-blowing and genuinely exhilarating film about the Big Bang and the starscape, played out on the semi-sphere above us. It gave some idea of the size and scope of the Universe and our tiny and insignificant and unlikely part in it all. We all have a teaspoon of atoms in us that were present in that explosion that created the Universe. We are star dust.
I can't see how anyone could be religious after seeing all of this, or if you were you'd have to admit that it must be tricky for God to keep his eye on the whole of creation. At the very least he can't be paying much attention to us. So don't worry about anything and just enjoy yourself. He's never going to see.
It was going to be hard for the rest of the museum to live up to this blistering opening and indeed nothing else was as good, but there was plenty to see and I particularly enjoyed the exhibitions about human origins and meteorites. It all made me even more impressed with scientists than I was before. It's utterly amazing that they have managed to piece together so much about evolution and the creation of the Universe. We certainly don't know it all yet, but human knowledge is expanding like the Universe and it's utterly bedazzling to think that we know as much as we do about what lived on earth 5 million years ago or how a star is born and dies. It's fantastic that we have places like this that are dedicated to this incredible knowledge and understanding and upsetting how few people actually come to learn about it all and how many others actively fight against the facts on display in order to protect ignorant and ancient superstitions. It's also frightening to think that those forces of reaction and ignorance might one day overpower us all and all that has been learned might be lost. Yet science shows us our common origins, whether it be the fact that we all originated in Africa, and before that in the oceans and before that in a superdense piece of matter. The perilous and impossible journey we've taken since then is more wonderful and incredible than any religious explanation. We are, as I am fond of pointing out, utterly insignificant, yet at the same time awesome and significant. No one is watching us or judging us, we just exist for a while and then die as everything has died before us and our atoms and maybe our gametes go onwards. It's a crazy and wonderful accident and we should just enjoy it for what it is and laugh at it and gape in awe at it all. We're already winners of a lottery with the most impossible odds and I wonder if everyone understood how unlikely our lives actually are and what it's actually taken for us to get here whether they would fly planes into buildings and wipe out thousands of us at a time. Religion almost makes life more trivial, because it promises something greater beyond, but there is nothing afterwards and what we're living now is the closest to a miracle that you're going to get. Wiping out a human life is to erase a 4 billion year journey. If you thought of it like that then you might think twice before ending someone's story.
Of course you can also argue that our lives are meaningless and random and that we're all doomed to die and in the long run our existence means nothing. Which is also true. But in the short term it's pretty cool.
The problem with all this stuff is that it's just not possible for us to comprehend the great tracts of time that it's taken for all this stuff to happen. Evolution seems unlikely and impossible on a common sense level. But if you can even start to comprehend how long it took for this changes to occur it makes more sense. A good example from today was something I saw about teh evolution of the thumb in monkeys. How did one of our fingers get shorter and stubbier? It's because it gave our distant ancestors an advantage in swinging through trees. The shorter finger meant the action was unimpeded. And so monkeys with smaller thumbs would get this slight advantage over those with longer ones and manage to escape predators slightly more efficiently and over time this meant that this became a preferred characteristic or one that favoured survival. Survival of the fittest isn't as it's often taken to mean about the strongest and toughest battering their way to superiority, it's about the attritubtes that are most fit for the environment.
Of course there's luck to it all too. Walking round New York and seeing the vast differences in shapes, sizes and colours of the people here, you can imagine that if some cataclysm wiped nearly all of us out and say that dumpy, short woman was the only one to survive, along with that tall thin speccy man then the human race would change pretty rapidly into something that looked pretty different to the perceived average now.
I hope the cataclysm doesn't come. And I hope that knowledge can overcome ignorance. But New York and this museum are not typical even of the country they're in. And certainly not of the world. I hope all that work doesn't go to waste.
Sadly we leave tomorrow. It's all flown by so quickly and I was just beginning to feel acclimatised and ready to have some fun. But it's back to London and reality and straight back to work. Been nice while it lasted though.
