"On recent estimates, the observable universe - the portion of the universe that we can detect through our telescopes - extends about 47 billion light-years in every direction."
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The ACT's nation-contradicting "yes" vote in the Voice referendum puffed some Canberrans up with pride; pride that Canberrans are so much more enlightened than Australia's lumpenboganproletariat at large. The ACT was the only jurisdiction to give the Voice a "yes".
My own, contrary feeling is that there is always a kind of Great Australian Loneliness about our being, as Canberrans, so very unlike other Australians. And referendum results (as well as the ACT's recent unAustralian endorsement of the Voice, the ACT was the only state or territory that in 1999 voted for our nation to become a republic) are a stark indicator of that loneliness.
This estrangement, this Canberra loneliness in the vastness of Australia, can suggest the loneliness of our planet, our famously Lonely Planet, in the vastness of the Cosmos.
"So where is everyone?" physicist Enrico Fermi agonised in 1950, thus giving us the famous Fermi Paradox. Fermi was marvelling that the Universe is so fabulously vast and yet paradoxically doesn't seem to be home to any beings other than ourselves. If there were others out there, then, Fermi noted, they would surely have shown themselves to Earth and Earthlings by now. If they did exist they have had ample time to gird up their loins (if aliens even have loins) to shimmer along to see us. Our solar system is roughly 4.5 billion years old.
I've always been quietly pleased with this lonely Canberra/lonely planet analogy of mine. But I've just had its validity shirtfrontingly tested by the startling Nautilus intro with which today's column is introduced, above.
Shimmering into my inbox just a few days before Christmas and haunting me ever since, it helped (assisted by the horrors of the Gaza and Ukraine wars) make the compulsory merriment of Christmas quite difficult to achieve.
Of course one had already known, vaguely, that the Universe is immense. Yet the Nautilus arithmetic somehow confronts the thinking person with a sense of the actual immensity of that immenseness. And what follows then for thinking men and women (this column's elite clientele) is an unnerving sense of how insignificant our planet and its short-lived earthlings are in the Immense Scheme of Things.
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The shock and awe of it all intensifies when one takes the Nautilus sums further with big, big multiplication sums, using the accepted measurement of what a light year is. I'm not suggesting you should do this (in fact I beg you not to because it will only deepen your merriness-sapping sense of your insignificance). But if you must do the maths, remember that in spite of being called a "year" a light year is a measurement of astronomical distance, not of time.
A light year then is the distance light travels in 365 days, and that distance is (prepare to gasp) exactly 9,460,730,472,580.8 kilometres. And so the portion of the universe that we can detect through our telescopes extends for about 47 billion of those unimaginable distances, and in every direction. Roominess beyond comprehension.
To digress for a moment, what a useful thing that Nautilus sentence could be, framed and hung in a prominent place in the homes and workplaces of those of us (for example politicians and newspaper columnists) prone to narcissism. The sentence is a sobering reminder, for those intoxicated with themselves, of how little each of us matters in the Cosmic Scheme of Things.
These Nautilus statistics especially shirtfronted and boggled my mind at Christmas because other parts of that sentimentally semi-Christian mind were so very engaged with the dear little loveliness of the Christmas Story.
But how parochial, for good or ill, the Christian faith seems, how utterly Earth-centric, how singularly focused only on the current affairs of our Earth Bubble.
The wider Universe pointed to in the Nautilus sentence gets almost no guernseys in the Bible or in the hymns and carols that Christians warble.
God's busy six days of Creation are almost all about the sculpting and furnishing of our lonely little planet. Did He, God, create the whole Universe as well (remember it stretches at least 47 billion light years in all directions) or has He had nothing to do with it, with that bigger picture? Is He only a Neighbourhood God, a kind of celestial Local Member only preoccupied with Earth, his teensy weensy constituency?
Alas, although Australia at 7,688,287 square kilometres is immense in its way, and Canberra and Canberrans are only a speck of area and of humanity in that general Aussie immensity, my treasured analogy (detailed above) cannot survive the might of the Nautilus statistics.
To compare the known, readily measurable immensity of Australia with the unknown and immeasurable immensity of the Universe is to compare two vastly different things. It is as futile as comparing platypuses, say, with pianos.
Then, too, my use of Fermi's "Where is everybody?" to stress Canberra's loneliness doesn't really fit.
Fermi fancied there may be no other beings anywhere in the Universe but the 470,000 Canberrans know that there are other beings out there in Australia (indeed there were 26,098, 346 of them at Tuesday's last count) however alien to us they may sometimes seem.
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
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