Lost in Space

I've been gazing at the latest "ultra deep field" images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the ones that reveal some of the first objects to emerge after the Big Bang. The pictures are certainly beautiful. The multicolored galaxies look like jewels scattered on black velvet -- like what you might see in Tiffany's window if you were the size of a fly.

There are 10,000 galaxies in the images, which cover a patch of sky that, viewed from Earth, is only one-tenth the size of the full moon. The light from these sparklers has taken 13 billion years to reach us, which means that much of what we're looking at doesn't exist anymore. Last night, I was thinking about how many civilizations must have risen and fallen "out there" in that time, how many billions of Shakespeares and Michelangelos lived that we'll never know about, how many tragedies (and comedies) occured, how many amazing stories were told that we'll never hear. But then, I thought, I could wonder similar things about what might be going on in Kazakhstan or in the apartment building across the street. It's a matter of scale and perspective, I suppose. Is anything real?