Imagine

Imagine, if you can set aside a few moments, that you just woke up from a deep sleep, almost from a hibernated state. You try to make sense of your surroundings that is mainly a very large room with an oversized porthole that opened up to thousands of stars ablaze against a jet black sky. You didn’t need to count them. At that moment you just knew you were in some space ship but not sensing that you are in motion. You look at the large door opposite the window but, momentarily, you held back the compulsion to open it, at least not yet. You took stock of your living quarters. It looks and feels comfortable. There is food and water and you are breathing normal air in a room so ideally cooled. Everything looks good.  It’s time to go out that door.

Your quarters open to a very large round area the size of a hotel lobby. There’s a dozen other people milling around and judging from their body language you know their situation is similar to yours and you surmise the doors you see along the circular lobby lead to their quarters as well. Introductions are made. It is clear that although you are all speaking the same language, it is obvious each one is from a different origin in physical features and cultural background and likely with a different birth language. You find out from almost all of them that the living quarters were different from each one and that yours appears to have the better if not the best accommodations. You have not checked your pantry or inside what looked like an extra-large refrigerator but you are certain you have more than any of them.  You excuse yourself to get back to your room to look at everything more closely.

There is a flat screen on a desk but no keyboard but there is a center toggle in front of it.  You touch it and the screen comes alive. Immediately, it informs you of the entire inventory in your room that is exclusively yours alone. Hunger is setting in. You find stacks of meal boxes inside the refrigerator. There is no microwave oven but the instruction on the box tells you where to put it on top of the table marked a green square. The green square turns red as you set the box on it. In just a few seconds it turns green again and you can smell the food is cooked.

A week just passed. Everyone has things to do but driven by different motivations and needs. You had no choice but to work because there was stuff around to keep you busy. You have tools and material and a host of many resources that surprisingly you are finding all around your quarters, so there were things to do. Aside from that, there was much to learn from the information coming out of the screen that seemed inexhaustible in scope and variety. However, it will not answer any specific issues around the other passengers. This forces everyone to interact with each other to gain what information others are willing to share.

A month just passed. You calculated that your space ship is traveling at 18.5 miles per second. You learned that and a lot of other things from reading and experimenting and observing star positions that change ever so slightly. What eludes you that you found no answers for are: the direction or destination you are heading to and for how long this whole voyage will last? You notice a bright golden orb from a distance, changing locations relative to your window from time to time but it appears to accompany your ship.  You assume that is the mother ship. You do not have a good sense of the size of your own ship but you think it is huge. From somewhere your provisions and wastes come in and out.

This is the second month. You and twelve other co-passengers had been meeting regularly at the lobby. Early on you all learned that no person can go into another’s room. Some learned that the hard way. One violent sensation was enough to discourage all intrusions after a few incidents and word spread quickly. Today you learn that only three others seem to do well. The rest are complaining and bickering about all kinds of issues around how provisions, living accommodations and things to work with in each quarters were apportioned unfairly. No answers can be found from the screen and since there were no keyboards and methods of communication to either the ship or the golden orb they were frustrated from not being able to register their complaints or summon for answers. A few were showing physical distress and weight loss from not having enough to eat.  They were miserable and duly dissatisfied.

You learned that you can take food provision out of your room (it’s just that no one can come in to your room if you were to host dinner or something). You and three others decided to share some of your provisions with others.  Surprisingly, your provisions are replenished in your room through the pantry and refrigerator. You notice though that replenishment is influenced by the amount of work you’ve been doing. You’ve been doing experiments and you brought out some of your projects that other passengers appreciated. The other three passengers were doing different things too which the others welcomed. This lasted only for a while.

Today, you are faced with a crisis at the lobby. Most of the nine unhappy folks were destroying things around them; some even throwing away food they were given. Only one seems to realize that it was not the thing to do. He pleaded with you and the other three. He revealed that his situation was improving. His provisions had dramatically increased as he continued working and a few of his projects were working. The five of you huddled for a while. The fifth person to join you made an impassioned speech to the whole group, “We’re in this together.  In case you didn’t notice we’re all captive in this ship. None of us knows where exactly we are heading among all these stars and other objects out there. We can’t know for how long we will be traveling and we’re not getting any answers from anywhere else outside of this group. We had better start working together or we will destroy each other.”

One of the eight discontented ones yelled back, “We’re all going to suffer together and be equally miserable”. At which point they all aimed themselves at you and the four others. Quickly, you each retreated to your quarters. You want so much to end this nightmare. It must or it will put an end to all.  The ship will likely keep going but none of you may survive to see where it will ultimately take this voyage.

Multiply the total number of passengers – you and the twelve others by 538 million and …

13 X 538,000,000 equals approximately 7 billion.  Expand your space ship to something very large that you are familiar with. Think the planet you know – earth. The golden orb could be the sun.

Think about this further. Earth is indeed speeding along its orbit around the sun at 18.5 miles per second. It is moving along – a planetary captive together with seven other planets, asteroids and comets; the whole solar system journeying at 135 miles per second around a galaxy. You find out your home galaxy – the Milky Way – around which the sun is a medium sized star among a billion others, is approaching another galaxy, the Andromeda, at 250,000 miles per hour. Like everything else in space, speed of anything can only be gleaned relative to one another. Our galaxy is part of a cluster of galaxies, dubbed the local group that is also traveling at tremendous speed. It’s just that somehow the Milky Way and Andromeda are aiming to collide in less than 4 billion years.

For now, the prospect of finding a different planet, another earth, is out of the question. This is your home with the rest of 7 billion others.

As you can see, managing to get along with a dozen people is a challenge. Is this just a story I concocted? It is a story, one of many in our history. We do not take the story of Cain and Abel literally. As an allegorical representation was it too absurd to not have been replayed many times over for millennia? Did we not develop societies and entire civilizations so far advanced over previous ones repeatedly only to fall and be destroyed from within?

Earth is indeed a space ship traveling through infinite space and time. All 7 billion of us have nowhere to go but remain here for the foreseeable future.

Whatever we decide to do we must begin now and imagine.

Note: If you scroll to the prior musing before this, and you’re up to it, imagine again: “Diamonds are not Forever?”