The consolations of the inconceivable
One cloudless autumnal evening we trekked up to the top of Mount Tiede. The landscape was lunar on Tenerife’s highest point: sandy grit caked our boots, and an atmospheric blackness stilled any last remnants of warmth. Our guide, puffer coat rustling with each small movement, gently tapped his telescope towards a pale white dot which lay somewhere near the midriff of the Andromeda constellation.
He gestured that we should look down the eyepiece. I waited until my vision adjusted: on the lens emerged a sharp speck of light which dissolved at the edges into an oceanic darkness. I blinked, pulled back. Peered again at the galaxy Andromeda which lay far beyond our Milky Way, deep in the deserted expanse of nothingness which lay between us. A fleeting feeling of terror pricked in my chest.
Wonders so inconceivable
We had glimpsed Andromeda as it had been some two and a half million years ago, the time it had taken for the dim coalesced light from one trillion stars to pass through an unfathomable blackness to twinkle on our retinas. Two and a half million years, one trillion stars: we share our universe with many such counts of inconceivable vastness.
For that moment, as I grasped in vain at the boundlessness of our universe, I’d felt a surge of dread. A horror at our cosmic unimportance, a sadness for our mortal frailty. But that was not all. I’d felt, too, a contentment borne out of the immeasurable fortune that we are here at all to bear witness to such immensity. That we have a place amidst a universe so grand and incomprehensible. That we can feel its unknowable majesty.
There were some consolations to be found in the inconceivable.
That there is such a thing as the inconceivable perhaps comes as no surprise. Over aeons, evolutionary forces blindly crafted humans into a species of tool-wielding primates who like to feel the ground at their feet. We are exquisitely adapted to, and ultimately constrained by, our immediate physical environments; for what use is wasting time intuiting the size of the universe when there are hungry mouths at home?
Even our most conceptual and abstract abilities germinated from the earthly world: we connect ideas together spatially like landmarks on a map, we use material metaphors for our moods which are up or blue or spiky, we ache with love and jealousy felt deeply within our chests.
Still, against the most overwhelming odds and the whims of almost unassailable unpredictability, we somehow had the good fortune to evolve enormously intricate brains, which, at one level of realisation, are comfortably the most complicated systems in the universe. These brains allow us to reflect on the inconceivable: that that there is so much beyond us, and that we are here only by a fluke of fortune for the palest speck of cosmic time.
Of course, our brains are imperfect, and our thoughts are liable to run away with themselves. We slip into preoccupations ranging from the most minute to the ungraspably large. People who suffer from mental health disorders can illustrate how some of these tendencies can be amplified in the cruellest fashion: how anxieties about cleanliness or social judgement can prevent us leaving our houses, how loss of meaning and existential dread can stop us leaving our beds. But at both ends of magnification, from the miniscule to the massive, the inconceivable can offer us some consolation.
There are approximately one hundred billion stars in a typical galaxy, give or take. And there are perhaps two thousand billion galaxies. At a rough estimate, this equates to around two billion trillion stars in the observable universe, of which our sun is a single one. There are, too, some suggestions that the true universe is at least two hundred and fifty times larger than the small portion we can observe.
These quantities are unfathomable to animals who cannot accurately imagine distances beyond those required to navigate the surface of our own planet. And it is on this planet that we are more than likely ever to be. It remains an untested hypothesis whether we could ever cope with the physical and psychological demands of the isolated months-long journey to Mars, never mind exiting the solar system to search for life amidst the unknown abyss. What the inconceivable teaches us is that, for now, and likely forever, we are alone in a universe whose breath is almost infinite.
We are hemmed in by time, too, in a universe which — in a human sense — has existed forever. There have been almost fourteen thousand million years since, somehow, something was created out of nothing. And after this explosion of somethingness, for billions of years, the cosmos was naught but a thin amorphous soup. Stars and planet and galaxies only very slowly began to crystallise out, and it took over nine billion years, two thirds of all time that there has ever been, for our little earth to form.
Even so, for some hundreds of millions of years our earth was an inhospitable Hades. Slowly, it calmed into a cooler but still unrecognisable methane sauna. Then water, pelted into the ground by the impact of frozen asteroids, slowly coalesced into seas and oceans. One day, somewhere, after an unimaginable length of time, single celled organisms brought life to the murky primaeval waters.
For three thousand million years, solely unicellular forms existed. All life was a gelatinous slimy gloop which covered the vast waterways of the world. But time is inconceivably deep and covers everything with the infinities of possibility. Under such spells, anything that is feasible, no matter how minutely rare, has a chance of occurring. Thus, over periods so long they cannot be imagined, something so extraordinarily unlikely as multicellular life emerged.
And modern Homo sapiens, too, the most complex of all animals, arrived some eight thousand generations ago: one twenty-thousandth of the total time life has existed on earth. The incredible briefness of our existence illuminates the fact that we are here only because of the tiniest fluke of a chance, and that one day we will probably cease to be here for the same reasons.
But in these eight thousand generations has existed the unimaginable richness of humanity, over one hundred billion lives filled with hope, fear, love, and loss. Each with their own beliefs, their own reasons for being. Each having no remembrance of things before them and no certainty of what is to come. Each feeling that they lived at some enormously important moment, that they came into being just as the dam which held back the reservoir of time burst at the seams.
And deep time teaches us that the earth, too, will be our paradise only transiently, that one day all that we know will be gone. Indeed, there have been at least five past occasions when life balanced precariously on a precipice. The worst of these, the late Permian extinction event, was caused by a mass eruption of volcanoes which wrapped the earth in an unliveable gaseous greenhouse. During this Great Dying most species over land and sea were snuffed out for good.
A thing that has been is that which shall be. Whether it be natural cause or a cause of our own doing, one day the world as we know it will be gone. Our time in the middle will have slipped away like sand washed away by the tide of time. An inexorable erosion, against which we are powerless, will slowly fade all remnants of our ever being here at all.
But, for now, persist we do. Against some unimaginable odds we are allotted our little while on this fertile dot amidst the immense cosmos. That we can even meditate on this wonder is thanks to the hundred thousand million neurons (about as many as there are stars as a typical galaxy) which synapse to form a great reticulated net of at least one hundred thousand billion connections in each of our brains. The most inconceivable thing of all, perhaps, is how this blob of jelly can produce something as grand and rich and ineffable as consciousness.
Reflecting on the inconceivable can come as a comfort, a reminder that everyday concerns mean nothing at the grand scale of the indifferent universe. What liberating relief to think that there is no objective means to measure our life against, no instructions on how to be. The inconceivable offers us this freedom: to choose how to live in the manner most meaningful to us.
But what terror, too, to think of a cosmos so inconceivably vast that we mean nothing at all, and on which we will never leave any trace. What terror that humanity will one day be just a speck in time which recedes from distance and leaves no dent in whatever grand narrative there might be. How are we to respond?
The answers may be in front of us, here on earth. In my work as a hospice psychiatrist, I have had the privilege of sitting with those who are truly facing up to the knowledge that one day, soon, they must cease to exist. Most are calm in the face of this fundamental terror, accepting the inevitable with humour or stoicism. And, I think, the calmest are those who are satisfied with choices they have made in life. Whether or not they believe in something or nothing after death, it is the comfort of a life well lived that is held most dearly.
And it is telling, too, which themes emerge from the narratives of those who are most comfortable with mortality. Their minds reach out to those who they love, whether still around or slipped away to the place they themselves will soon be. It is the simple, homely narratives that predominate: a quiet meal shared with their spouse, the re-weaving of a bond with their errant child, the course of a walk on a crisp winter’s morning, the hug of a friend whom they hope will be around to see their team win the championship long after they themselves have gone.
Although the inconceivable readily drags our challenges into some sort of perspective, it provides no comment at all on how we might find value. But the fact that the depths refuse to answer our calls for meaning does not mean that the calls themselves are futile. Quite the contrary: meaning can be found in the simple harmony between our lives and the things which give us value, no matter if an indifferent universe refuses to ratify this agreement. The reverberated silence cannot smother our significance.
To truly face the inconceivable, we must put aside any notions that humanity will ever have any lasting impact on the cosmic scale. The notions we might instead dwell on are less grand: to face the inconceivable is simply to choose to live as best we can for ourselves and those around us. For what more do we require than a reminder that we, and we alone, find meaning against the absurd indifference of the cosmos? A single flower in the middle of a desert is dwarfed by the unending dunes which will eventually envelop it, but that does not mean that it is not beautiful.
The inconceivable teaches us that we are insignificant in a causal sense against the vastness of time and space. We are but a mote of dust which dances in the sunlight for just a fraction of time before it is blown away into an unending night. But the smallness of our place says nothing about value. If our lives have meaning, then it matters not that we are insignificant of scale. Life matters simply because we experience it.
Our location in space or time does not diminish the value of happiness or the anguish of pain. Meanings we cling to still hold value in the context of the fact that one day humanity will be extinct and that the universe itself may be extinguished by the force of its own expansion. That we have the capacity to find meaning within the coldly indifference cosmos is an immeasurably valuable gift. Once we have gone, the final inconceivability of our consciousness is lost forever. But that does not mean we do not matter now.
These were the bases of the emotions that struck me the night we saw Andromeda. The utter insignificance of our being on the scale of the unfathomable universe, a vastness which renders our problems almost indistinguishable from absolutely nothing at all. But, too, the vastly incomprehensible fortune we have in experiencing these pathetic, wonderful, meaningful lives of ours. Those are the consolations of the inconceivable.
Consolations to care for ourselves and those around us whose existence is just as unbearably unlikely and fragile as our own, consolations to care for our planet, the only one we have for now and forever, and consolations to reflect on the inconceivable wonders which surround us in the briefest of time that we are the custodians of our own little worlds.
This essay was written in 2023.