Unlike most students in this class, I'm not a science or mathematics major, and I've never taken an Astronomy class before. While you all could undoubtedly teach me more than I could ever hope to know about your various fields and your bundles of scientific knowledge, I feel most connected to the vastness of the sky when I approach it from a more abstract viewpoint. I'm currently reading The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. In a passage where the narrator is remarking on the beauty and sorrow of the great fish he has hooked, he says, "'The fish is my friend too... But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.' Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought" (Hemingway, 75). Obviously we know that the moon does not run from the sky and that it is impossible for an old fishermen to touch the stars, but the sentiment is abundantly clear. He knows that, like the great and stoic fish he is trying to catch, the sun, moon, and stars are all some aspect of a beautiful and powerful force; that of the natural world. He thinks, and I agree, that mankind is just a small cog in a huge machine, and that our self-awareness makes us no more important or wonderful than each individual, even miniscule, aspect. As people with scientific minds I'm sure you all look at the sky and are awed by its vastness and technicality, holding knowledge we haven't even begun to understand. And you're all correct, and I also find it amazing. Sometimes, though, it's nice to remember that we are just small; just working together with so many other forces, to live and survive in such a huge universe. If all of humanity is so small, if our needs could be powered for 500,00 years with a single second of concentrated energy from the sun, if we could never learn the vast complexities of our universe in a thousand lifetimes to come, and we have done so many wonderful and important and world-changing things, think about how much you can accomplish, even when you might feel small.
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