THE WEATHER this week has been so crisp and clear: sunshine and blue skies in the daytime, bracing wind and brilliant, star-filled views in the evening. The other night I stepped outside and looked up into stars, constellations and planets. I felt so full, so happy.

SOMETIMES, I fear that my generation will be the last one to remember what a sky full of stars looked like. I worry that when my Mogs is a big girl, she will consider it a rare and exotic treat to see more than a faint glimmer or two up there. Right now, I think that my fears are probably unfounded. But when I get this way, it’s as if a great weight has been placed on my shoulders. Lately I’ve begun to wonder why it matters so much to me. Why precisely is it so important to look up and see something in the darkness?

I’VE COME to the conclusion that for me, there must be some spiritual aspect to our relationship with outer space. If light pollution and human waste someday seal humankind off from the ordinary, individual experience of gazing at the stars, for me it will be like being nailed into a coffin, without any way to connect to anything larger than myself, anything that can transcend the scale of human experience. Just think: if tomorrow there were suddenly no more poetry in the world, even those who do not write or read poetry would probably feel the absence, the lack of any way to understand our lives with anything other than the most mundane, pedestrian vocabulary.

THE MORNING after my star-gaze, I happened to read an AP news article on recent findings by astronomers that suggest a terrific, violent universe. Here are some of the things astronomers have seen:

and best of all –

THIS GAS cloud is moving so fast that astronomers can see a wave of galactic material plowing up in front of its path, like a motorboat speeding toward us through the ocean of space. “When it hits,” said one astronomer, “there will be fireworks that form new stars and really light up the neighborhood.” But no need to worry: this gas cloud will hit a part of the Milky Way far from Earth, and the biggest collision will be 40 million years in the future.

HERE’S a quote from another astronomer: “Intellectually and spiritually, if I can use that word with a lower case ’s,’ it’s awe-inspiring… It’s a great universe.”

AFTER contemplating a cataclysm of this magnitude, one that defeats almost all attempts at description, one that will occur so far in the future that all of human history will be a mere blip in the distant past, I am naturally drawn to questions of human existence: How did we come to be here? Why are we relevant? What, if anything, will it mean when we finally disappear? To me, these are spiritual questions. But now I’m scratching my head over whether the “s” in that word should be big or small.

WELL, what’s the difference? I did a little looking on my trusty Internets, and it appears that the consensus view is this: spirituality with a small “s” describes an experience of personal consciousness and moments of awareness that are heightened by an investment of emotion and aesthetic response.

THAT’S pretty laudable, definitely better than craven selfishness. And I don’t think it’s a completely nonsensical formulation of what spirituality could mean, either. It’s just that I am disinclined to accept distinctions between one flavor of spirituality and another. Is it important that a spiritual experience bear the trappings of spirituality — scripture, the burning bush, Kabbalistic writings, the Guy With The Long White Beard, etc? Or is it possible to find “big-S” spirituality in unexpected places? Because in my opinion, science is spiritual, with an “S” so big it reaches up to the stars.

WHAT A treat for me, then, to stumble upon an article in the New York Times science section (”The Big Brain Theory,” by Dennis Overbye) that was at once crazy and fun and helped to corroborate my sense of the beauty, mystery and yes, spirituality demonstrated by our universe. Ahem — our multiverse.

READERS who are not prone to migraines are encouraged to read the article in its entirety. For everyone else, what follows is a mixture of paraphrasings and quotes from the article that will hopefully convey its most salient points. My apologies to Mr. Overbye, the author:

One of the problems tackled by cosmology (the branch of astronomy that studies the origin and structure of the universe) involves something called the “arrow of time” — why does time go in only one direction? Apparently there are no physical laws that make this so; scientists feel that the workings of physics should hold true whether the film is running forwards or backwards. According to a scientist quoted in the Times article, “When you break an egg and scramble it you are doing cosmology.” So, to speak in cosmological terms, why can’t you unscramble an egg?

Well, in trying to figure this out, cosmologists have hit upon a very difficult and problematic possibility. If this possibility were true, it would mean that you yourself reading this are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution. Your memories and the world you think you see around you would be illusions.

 

But let’s back up a bit. Astronomers know that the universe was born in the Big Bang, which somehow set the arrow of time, 14 billion years ago. The linchpin of the Big Bang is thought to be an explosive moment known as inflation, during which space became suffused with energy that had an anti-gravitational effect and ballooned violently outward, ironing the kinks and irregularities out of what is now the observable universe and endowing primordial chaos with order. (Before this could happen, the Big Bang had to create space itself, which hadn’t existed previously. Like you, I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one.) When inflation occurred, fluctuations in the field driving it would have seeded the universe with the lumps that eventually grew to be galaxies, stars and people.

The expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating, making galaxies fly away from one another faster and faster. According to some theories, this runaway process will last forever (a phenomenon Albert Einstein called the “cosmological constant”) and distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another. Being in such a space would be like being surrounded by a black hole.

Rather than simply going to black, however, the cosmic horizon would glow, emitting a feeble spray of elementary particles and radiation, with a temperature of a fraction of a billionth of a degree, courtesy of quantum uncertainty. That radiation bath will be subject to random fluctuations, and every once in a very long, long time, one of those fluctuations would be big enough to recreate the Big Bang. In the fullness of time this process could lead to an endless series of recurring universes. Our present universe could be part of that chain.

Across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. In the same way the odds of a real word showing up when you shake a box of Scrabble letters are greater than a whole sentence or paragraph forming, “regular” universes would be vastly outnumbered by weird ones, including flawed variations on our own all the way down to naked brains. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

Over the course of eternity, anything is possible. After some Big Bang in the far future, it’s possible that you yourself will re-emerge. Eventually you will appear with your table and your computer. But it’s more likely that you will be reincarnated as an isolated brain, without the baggage of stars and galaxies. In terms of probability, as one scientist said, “It’s cheaper.” And if some atoms in another universe stick together briefly to look, talk and think exactly like you, is it really you?

You might wonder what’s wrong with a few brains — or even a preponderance of them — floating around in space. For one thing, as observers these brains would see a freaky chaotic universe, unlike our own, which seems to persist. So our orderly universe is either exceedingly unique — the odds are infinitesimally low that such a universe would come into being — or else it is an illusion. And one of the central orthodoxies of cosmology is that humans don’t occupy a special place in the cosmos, that we and our experiences are typical of cosmic beings.

Some cosmologists have suggested that the solution to the “naked brain” paradox was in denying the presumption that the universe would accelerate eternally. In other words, perhaps the cosmological constant is not really constant. If the cosmological constant eventually faded away, the universe would revert to normal expansion and what was left would eventually fade to black. With no more acceleration there would be no horizon with its snap, crackle and pop, and thus no material for fluctuations and superfluous brains.

The decay, if and when it comes, would rejigger the laws of physics and so would be fatal and total, spreading at almost the speed of light and destroying all matter without warning. There would be no time for pain, one cosmologist wrote: “And no grieving survivors will be left behind. So in this way it would be the most humanely possible execution.”

 

LET’S recap, shall we? Among the theories being studied in astronomy today, we have the possibility — indeed, the apparent likelihood — that our histories as individuals and as a species are illusory, that our experiences and everything we think we know about the world are false, that we are each nothing more than a few clumps of cells floating in the void, and that we were formed randomly and will continue to re-form sporadically in an infinite cycle of reincarnation. As an alternative, it may just be that the whole rig will someday zero out and cease to exist in one fiery instant. (Perhaps someday soon?)

YES, THE options are bleak, but then I’m used to a sense of bleakness in the spiritual life. What really interests me is the idea that everywhere we humans look — whether that’s into a book, a telescope, or a pair of field glasses — we can find opportunities to seriously question who we are, why we’re here, what our experiences mean, and what the future holds for us. Someday, I want my little girl to be able to stare up into the night sky and bravely face those questions.