February 9, 2022
Probable Impossibilities
Alan Lightman
Professor of Physics Emeritus, Professor in the Humanities, MIT
George Bustin, Introducer, and Alan Lightman
Minutes of the 19th Meeting of the 80th Year
President Steve Schreiber called the Zoom meeting of February 9th to order at 10:15 AM. Nine Guests were introduced: George Bustin had three, Andrew Hornick, Robert Stek, and Stuart Taylor; Russ White had Rainer Muser; Lynn Johnston had Bob Johnston; Arthur Exchenlauer had Karen Macrae; Jock McFarlane had Maggie Sullivan; and Lanny Jones had Sarah Jones and Elizabeth Christopherson. A total of 158 viewed the meeting. Marsha Levin-Rojer read the minutes of the previous meeting.
George Bustin introduced the speaker, Alan Lightman, a professor in both the Humanities and Physics at MIT, author of both astrophysical treatises and novels, who has been called “the poet-laureate of science writers.” The title of his talk, also the title of his most recent book, was “Possible Impossibilities, Musings, Beginnings, Endings,” meditative essays of a scientist. In this talk to us, he shared his meditations – both as a world-class astrophysicist and as a poet --on life in the universe.
Many of us, no doubt, have looked at the starry firmament and felt how small our place was in the universe; Prof. Lightman provided a brilliantly informed tour of our universe’s space and time, and then gave a deep poetic meditation on life inspired by the facts shown on the tour.
He started with the launch of the Webb telescope a few months ago, and then related the astounding finding that the slightly older space telescope Kepler had made: About 10% of all stars appear to have habitable planets – that is, planets in orbits where water would neither freeze nor boil away – planets that biologists believe could harbor life. As there are about 100 billion stars in our own, average-sized galaxy, the Milky Way, at least 10 billion planets in the Milky Way could harbor life. As there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe… then a billion trillion planets share with our planet the potential for life. So it is highly probable that there is significant other life in the Universe. Prof. Lightman continued that, while life’s existence then may seem common, viewed as a percentage of all matter in the universe, it is quite rare. Using the Earth’s biosphere as a model, even if all habitable planets in the universe had Earth’s biosphere, the inanimate matter in the Universe would exceed all the living matter by a billion billion times: if the Gobi Desert represented the matter in the universe, living matter would be represented only a few grains of sand only.
He then considered the presence of life in the dimension of time. The earliest living things could not exist until stars, created 100 million years after the Big Bang, exploded in supernova to create elements heavy enough to form life’s compounds; living matter could start to exist a billion years after the Big Bang. The end of living matter comes when the expansion of the Universe dilutes available energy to below that needed to sustain life, at about 1000 billion years post-Big-Bang. While this era of 1000 billion years of living matter seems long, compared to the end of all matter – when atomic particles decay to nothingness, about a million billion billion years post-Big-Bang, life exists for a “brief” one ten-billionth of the Universe’s matter’s existence. In Prof. Lightman’s expression, “life is a flash in a pan.”
After this science, the poet Lightman appeared: He shared with us, and perhaps invoked in us, the feelings these calculations about living matter the universe invoke in him. He imagined the conscious beings who must exist, scattered as they may be in the universe like those grains of sand in the dunes of the Gobi desert, among them astronomers and scientists and people who make the same observations -- and conclusions -- about life’s specialness. We and they share a brief but wonderful phenomenon, living. We share with them this wonderous thing, and in a way, though we can never see nor touch nor speak with them, we have kinship. As he concluded, “The ability to witness and reflect on the spectacle of existence, a spectacle that is at once mysterious, joyous, tragic, trembling, majestic, confusing, comic, nurturing, unpredictable and predictable, ecstatic, beautiful, cruel, sacred, devastating, exhilarating, the cosmos will grind on for eternity long after we’re gone cold and unobserved, but for this brief period of life’s existence, we have seen, we have been, we have felt, we have lived.”
Respectfully submitted,
David Vilkomerson
George Bustin introduced the speaker, Alan Lightman, a professor in both the Humanities and Physics at MIT, author of both astrophysical treatises and novels, who has been called “the poet-laureate of science writers.” The title of his talk, also the title of his most recent book, was “Possible Impossibilities, Musings, Beginnings, Endings,” meditative essays of a scientist. In this talk to us, he shared his meditations – both as a world-class astrophysicist and as a poet --on life in the universe.
Many of us, no doubt, have looked at the starry firmament and felt how small our place was in the universe; Prof. Lightman provided a brilliantly informed tour of our universe’s space and time, and then gave a deep poetic meditation on life inspired by the facts shown on the tour.
He started with the launch of the Webb telescope a few months ago, and then related the astounding finding that the slightly older space telescope Kepler had made: About 10% of all stars appear to have habitable planets – that is, planets in orbits where water would neither freeze nor boil away – planets that biologists believe could harbor life. As there are about 100 billion stars in our own, average-sized galaxy, the Milky Way, at least 10 billion planets in the Milky Way could harbor life. As there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe… then a billion trillion planets share with our planet the potential for life. So it is highly probable that there is significant other life in the Universe. Prof. Lightman continued that, while life’s existence then may seem common, viewed as a percentage of all matter in the universe, it is quite rare. Using the Earth’s biosphere as a model, even if all habitable planets in the universe had Earth’s biosphere, the inanimate matter in the Universe would exceed all the living matter by a billion billion times: if the Gobi Desert represented the matter in the universe, living matter would be represented only a few grains of sand only.
He then considered the presence of life in the dimension of time. The earliest living things could not exist until stars, created 100 million years after the Big Bang, exploded in supernova to create elements heavy enough to form life’s compounds; living matter could start to exist a billion years after the Big Bang. The end of living matter comes when the expansion of the Universe dilutes available energy to below that needed to sustain life, at about 1000 billion years post-Big-Bang. While this era of 1000 billion years of living matter seems long, compared to the end of all matter – when atomic particles decay to nothingness, about a million billion billion years post-Big-Bang, life exists for a “brief” one ten-billionth of the Universe’s matter’s existence. In Prof. Lightman’s expression, “life is a flash in a pan.”
After this science, the poet Lightman appeared: He shared with us, and perhaps invoked in us, the feelings these calculations about living matter the universe invoke in him. He imagined the conscious beings who must exist, scattered as they may be in the universe like those grains of sand in the dunes of the Gobi desert, among them astronomers and scientists and people who make the same observations -- and conclusions -- about life’s specialness. We and they share a brief but wonderful phenomenon, living. We share with them this wonderous thing, and in a way, though we can never see nor touch nor speak with them, we have kinship. As he concluded, “The ability to witness and reflect on the spectacle of existence, a spectacle that is at once mysterious, joyous, tragic, trembling, majestic, confusing, comic, nurturing, unpredictable and predictable, ecstatic, beautiful, cruel, sacred, devastating, exhilarating, the cosmos will grind on for eternity long after we’re gone cold and unobserved, but for this brief period of life’s existence, we have seen, we have been, we have felt, we have lived.”
Respectfully submitted,
David Vilkomerson