Our larger world, the universe, is a marvellous place with
boundless potentials.
But what is greater,
the gigantic universe of infinite space
or its precious gem, the human being?
"Can you remember how simple life was in Russia, compared to this?" I asked Natalia one day when we met in the planetarium as we often did.
Of course, we didn't have to meet there in order to be together for intimacies. We met there, because the stars fascinated us. There was something about the stars that made everything equal. It made everything equal like that accident had done at a Soviet missile station that had released a missile. The missile had wiped out the northeastern USA and had collapsed the USA overnight to the status of a third rate entity of no significance. The USA had ceased to matter from that day forward as if it had exited the universe. None of that seemed significant anymore. It was behind us. The world recovered, though millions had perished. In a round about way those terrible days had changed the world for the better. It had forced mankind to dig deep, which everyone had refused to do before so that the calamity was allowed to happen by default. This subsequent digging deep into its humanity had rescued mankind from a threat to its civilization that no one had had the courage to counter under the thumb of empires wanting to be. Ironically an accident had caused that change. For four thousand years mankind had been stuck under the thumb of empires, from the Brahmin Empire in early India that nearly destroyed a budding civilization, to the Persian Empire, the Roman and Byzantine Empire, to the Lombard banking empire, and the Venetian Empire that eventually became the British Empire which staged the rise of the fascist empires in Europe and then around the world. that humanity should have made from the strength of its own resources. Mankind should have ended the reign of empires, the source of every war and the black ages that darkened history. Had mankind's inner resources been applied to gain its freedom as human beings a long string of horrific tragedies could have been avoided. This simple reality, of course, was so much easier to recognize now, when seen from space where the human being is alone, a shining star in a vast void.
Speaking of the celestial stars, the simple reality was that the same stars had shone over my home in Ohio that had also shone over Natalia's home in Kiev where we first met. The stars had become a great equalizers in that respect, because even after all those years had passed, the stars had remained still the same, even when seen from far out in space and a vast distance from Earth. It appeared to me that our giant ship utterly seemed insignificant in those vast spaces of the universe, while it was a marvel in our eyes, a marvel of marvels that brought us closer to infinity and also to the utter absurdity of our petty divisions. If the ship brought home nothing else, but this one single vision of man and the universe, I felt that the effort of building the ship would be more than repaid.
As the ship rotated on its axis, the planetarium opened up a grand view of an endless sea of thousands of distant lights that continuously rolled by our window. The greatest fascination, however, lay in that which we could not see, It came from the excitement of imagining and speculating what wonders lay beyond the tiny fraction of the universe that our limited sensees could behold, though even this tiny bit seemed infinite itself.
Our view was limited by distant blue, red, green and yellow gas clouds that seemed to glow at various intensities in the far reaches of space. Other obstructions were dark clouds of dust that filter the light from the most distant places. They say that the distant stars would appear a billion times brighter without these clouds of dust. We would be able to see clusters of galaxies. Even the many millions of stars in our own galaxy would then make our heavens ablaze with a great brilliance. Perhaps we should be thankful that their brilliance is shrouded in dust, which also blocks the cosmic radiation that might be harmful at a million-times greater intensity.
