Destination Unknown

The hairy ape had been walking on all fours for hours. He got tired of seeing nothing but a few feet of ground around him. So, he did the obvious thing. He stood up on two legs. Now he could see far away. He soon discovered how his hands were now free to hold on to sticks or stones that could come in handy in an emergency. The other apes were furious. “Aayeeee!”, screamed the other apes, “What is this ape’s problem? Who does he think he is?” However, soon these apes were aping the enterprising ape. Lady apes too thought standing on two legs was very cool. “So much more dignified than walking around on four feet like ... ugh... common hyenas”, as one of them delicately put it. That was a few million years ago.

Flash forward to about 500 years ago. Walking on two feet was a well-established tradition by now, with the good Lord in the heaven and the sun and stars peacefully circling around the earth which was created by God to house His special creation, mankind. Along came Copernicus and rocked the boat by proclaiming that the earth was not the center of the universe at all. Having written this, Copernicus promptly died in 1543 just as his findings were being published in a book, leaving other scientists, notably poor Galileo, holding the bag and facing the wrath of the church at this blasphemous thought. But the spirit of that enterprising ape proved strong, and the Age of Reason dawned upon Europe bringing it to the fore of human progress. By the end of the 19th century, a new equilibrium, essentially based on Newton’s laws, and all the fuss of the previous centuries seemed over.

Then came hopping from nowhere that little frog from Zurich, a patent clerk named Einstein, who shattered this comfortable little world of Newtonian physics. In a series of papers starting 1905, he made mankind aware of a Cosmic Level with his theory of relativity with mind blowing concepts concerning the bending of space and the changing speed of time itself that turned poor Newton’s physics of everyday life seem simplistic and quaint in comparison.

Einstein’s findings were merely the first in a series that exploded man’s awareness of creation in a few short decades At the Galactic Scale, the earth became an insignificant speck in a vast universe of receding galaxies discovered by Edwin Hubble. At the Molecular Scale the Book of Life itself was discovered. Things got weirder at the next lower level with strange creatures like shy bosons and ghostly neutrinos, a world where something could be at two places at the same time. Particle Accelerators costing billions of dollars and stretching across miles were built to study this incredible world. The last two decades of the 20th century went below the Particle Level to find that everything was made up of Strings. A string being so small that if an atom was the entire solar system, a string would be a tree on the planet earth. And each string resting on membranes (or branes) that traverse not just our familiar three dimensions but 10 or more dimensions!! These strings are thus starting to tie the tiniest Scales with the Cosmic Scales, and to explain things that even the mighty Einstein struggled with until his dying day. It is even beginning to appear likely that the entire universe is just one of many.

Far from being the center of the universe, occupied by the foremost of God’s Creation, earth and all its inhabitants have been steadily reduced to infinitesimal speck in a universe of unimaginable scales and grandeur. And yet, the real wonder is that a creature that, just a few million years ago was competing on all fours with wild animals for food, should today start to even comprehend the incredible grandeur that surrounds us. Can there be any doubt that, barring some calamity, mankind has a destiny that lies beyond earth, beyond the planets, beyond the stars, beyond even the realm of three dimensional space in which it was born?