Does matter matter?

 

When philosophical argument turns its attention to the meaning of life it has a marked tendency to become terribly vague and suddenly ironclad structures of immaculate logic appear very fragile. Into what were otherwise very reasonable deductions creep wild flurries of guesswork or even faith. Naturally this process upsets everybody involved, creating individual dogmas that are based upon only eloquence. By the time that all the shouting has died down it transpires that the sum collection of the philosophic edification amassed about the reason for our existence pivots entirely not on the existence, or not, of a god-head but on whether we matter to it. As to our proper position in the cosmos, not a word of enlightenment can be heard. With or without god, the holy grail of human thought becomes a simple cry; are we important in this universe?

 

In the face of this plea come the more recent horror stories from the scientific community. Professing a complete neutrality, they tell us that space is very big indeed. On a physical scale it appears that we influence so minute a part of the universe that it means less than nothing. The only consolation is that other 'life-forms' are equally unimportant. In fact the very scientists that have measured and photographed this immensity tell us that, in all probability, there are mega trillions of unimportant 'life-forms' in our universe. Not that I would want to question this statement, but it would seem to me that the very existence of so many other beings, however small they may be, is at the very least meaningful to us humans - if not an important part of the cosmic plan, whatever that may be.

 

Just how many others might there be around us? The answer cuts both ways.

 

There are, scientists in Australia found out, 70 sextillion visible stars in the universe. Even to write this out is quite disturbing: 700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. If only one in 20 million of those stars have life around them, quite a conservative assumption, then about 350,000,000,000,000,000 different ecosystems exist - each unique according to the specific conditions of the planet and the course evolution has taken. This is a number so vast that it doesn't register on the psyche. Hugely mind bogglingly immense as this total is it amounts to a mere few hundred million billion scattered across the 20 billion light years of space that we can see. A simple rule of thumb guide gives an average of one of these life bearing planets every 1,000,000,000,000 cubic light years of space. A devastatingly small number. Even taking into account the fact that stars tend to cluster in huge clumps called galaxies, leaving little but vacuum between them, an effect that concentrates the life density into island galaxies, there could only be a paltry 200 or so 'others' in our galaxy.

 

Still, in all probability the universe has seen fit to give us 200 or so neighbours, a fact that allows us to extend our view of brotherhood beyond humans to include all 'life-forms'. The question of the meaning of life comes back into focus and with it the new found qualification of 'just what do we mean to the universe?'

 

Perhaps size doesn't matter, or if it does it may be that it works in a peculiarly inverse way. This particular argument is a firm favourite of just about all humans faced with the horrible thought that we may just be completely meaningless. It states that precisely because life probably exists in all the parts of the universe that has star systems like our own (which means all the universe that we can see) then the creation of life is an important product of the cosmos. Some even go so far as to state that it is an important 'aim' of the universe. If it takes 14 billion years and 100,000 light years of space to create just 200 types of 'beings' then it just may be that we are very a very rare and special distillation of the universe indeed.

 

Thus it seems that size is of no real consequence when set against quality and quantity. Not that life can be very much bigger than it is on our planet, or even smaller for that sake, because of a simple and eminently physical ratio between the volume and the surface area of a sphere. Planets, stars and atoms are the way they are simply because of this and so, it appears, are cells and humans. Its hardly headline news, but something that is often over looked: we are, in terms of scale slap bang in the centre of the universe - which goes to show 35 quadrillion beings can't be wrong.