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While fighting off a recent lurgy which is now subsiding, one idea which flitted though my mind was to imagine what it might be like standing on the surface of Pluto. Perhaps the idea popped into my head because illness does induce a sense of remoteness and Pluto is certainly remote.
The idea isn’t feasible of course - nobody will ever go to Pluto. There are all manner of practical considerations. For example, with all that frozen nitrogen around a chap would obviously need a particularly stout pair of shoes to stave off rampant chilblains. Nike trainers wouldn’t do at all.
Levity aside though, the Pluto idea does offer a hint of something. A tiny, insignificant planet, it would surely offer us a very good sense of the chill reality of ancient, lifeless loneliness. This in turn should remind us that the whole universe is filled with just that - ancient, lifeless loneliness.
The universe may be unimaginably vast and majestic, but maybe out there on the edge of the solar system, Pluto would remind us of something else – a familiar question. What is it all for? It could also lead us to a not unfamiliar answer. Nothing - it has no purpose.
2 comments:
“I see the terrifying spaces of the universe that enclose me, and I find myself attached to a corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am more in this place than in another, nor why this little time that is given me to live is assigned me at this point more than another out of all the eternity that has preceded me and out of all that will follow me.”
- Pascal.
You could, though, consider that all that vast space and eternal loneliness, even the stupendous pointlessness of it all, is merely a mental state. Your brain has created three-dimensional space, and time, from little flashes on your retina and the glowing of synapses.
Maybe.
Sam - in a sense it is stupendously pointless, but in another sense it is a stupendous demonstration of natural law operating without any refence to us at all - it doesn't need us or a purpose. In that sense maybe it isn't pointless, we can absorb something from it.
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