Pewter's Sky, Martyr's Blue...

"Come quickly, I am tasting stars!"
— Dom Perignon (1638-1715), at the moment of his discovery of champagne

Stars fascinate me. They're the illusion of permanence, I think. They're either flaring up or snuffing out. But there after, I can pretend...that things last. I can pretend that life lasts longer than we think. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flash and fade. Morbid worlds collide and crumble into cold and dust. But I can pretend.

We live in a gravitational "froth" where gravity binds stars together to form galaxies, binds galaxies into local groups of galaxies, groups of galaxies into clusters, clusters into superclusters, and superclusters into "walls." Luckily for us, the galaxies, with their strong gravitational attraction, recycle the remants left over from stellar explosions. The number of stars in the universe boggles the mind. And the assemblage is equally staggering—black holes, red giants, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, Cepheid variables, neutron stars, pulsars...ad infinitum. Perhaps the laws work to make the universe as variegated as possible.

So who are we? Where do we come from? The question is not why we were flung at random between the profusion of matter and stars but whether we derive images powerful enough to deny our nothingness ?

God gave us darkness so we could see the stars. And without stars there would be no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium and life would never have evolved. There would be no planets, no microbes, no plants, no tigers, no humans. We watch stars explode at the end of their lives to wash the new elements far into space. Without these supernova explosions, there can be no seagull cries, computer chips, petaflops, Beethovens or even the tears of a little girl. There could be no Jesus to exhort us on the Mount. There would be no one to speak the words, "Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in heaven." Without exploding stars, there would be a heaven but there would be no Earth.

In about five billion years, the hydrogen fuel in our Sun will be exhausted in its core and the Sun will begin to die and dramatically expand, becoming a red giant. At some point, our oceans will boil away. No one on Earth will be alive see a red glow filling most of the sky. In about seven billion years, the Sun's outer atmosphere may engulf the Earth. Due to atmospheric friction, in many scenarios the Earth will spiral into the sun and incinerate. All the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius and the whole temple of man's achievement, must they be buried beneath this debris of a planet? Be the deathless boredom of the sidereal calm or the gory descent into chaos, no human will be left to regret a lost Sun. We will have offloaded our minds to super computers, left the solar system in a final exodus and sought salvation in the stars. Rationalists predict that religion would be the first thing to fall when humanity went to the stars and found no Gods. But they were never good at that game. They never even noticed that when we finally went out there every supernatural force known at the time went right with us...for they can't say whose God is stronger, your's or mine ?

Towards the end, life is possible, but not too easy. And in the end we may survive, bent and broken, a better species. Maybe we're making this thing called 'life' much more complicated than it really is.

Our preoccupation of staring up at the stars is old as the hills. It isn't only the beauty of the night sky that thrills. It's the sense that some of those points of light are the home stars of beings not so different from us, daily cares and all, who look across space with wonder, is there anyone there just as we do. Whether they like it or not, they would be downloading Pamela Anderson photos, conspiracy theories, eBay auctions, and things wild and weird. I like to imagine the faint possibility that supercivilizations are making contacts with us even as we speak. If there are superintelligent, technological races in our Galaxy, then their messengers maybe hibernating in our Solar System. But maybe, the surest sign there is intelligent life is they have not contacted us yet.

Three things fill me up with wonder and awe: the starry skies above me, the quintessence of nature around me and the moral law within me. It is while praying I experience my worst doubts about God and it is while looking at the stars I make the best leaps of faith. And I've always cried I'm not that wise as the day I was born.

I, Stardust.