I’ve recently enjoyed a short holiday with my wife, younger daughter and two elderly parents in Sardinia. One evening, after some Sardinian wine, beer and local myrtle liqueur, I wandered out in the chill night to catch some fresh air before bed. I looked out over the night-time hills and valleys and was rapt with the sound of frogs croaking, down the hill in the damp stream. They would go silent for a while, and then one would start up again. Then all the other frogs would join in, and an amphibian cacophony would result. Presumably, at some point in the evening, there would be some kind of frog-based orgy, everyone would get pregnant and the new generation would arise. Biology was never my favourite subject at school.
Anyway, I guess that those frogs have been at it in that valley for a long time. Maybe 10,000 years, maybe 100,000. Maybe a million years. Who knows?
Then I looked up and I saw the faintest sliver of a new crescent moon. The rest of the Moon was clearly revealed by ‘Earthshine,’ which is light that comes from the Sun, bounces off the earth, shines on the side of the Moon that is not illuminated by the Sun and is then seen from Earth. Gazing up in the cold night, it struck me that the Moon has been revolving around the world for the best part of four and a half billion years, uninterruptedly, since a Mars-sized body smashed into the Earth early in the history of the Solar System. Every now and again, a meteor of some description, larger or smaller, bashes into the Moon and makes a new crater. It’s still happening today. Otherwise, nothing much happens up there, apart from about five year’s worth of visits from a dozen Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. I’m reminded of the old joke about the terrible party on the Moon: “There was just no atmosphere.”
Looking up again, I saw a spectacular starry sky, with a few easily-identified constellations; Orion, of course, but also Gemini, Leo, the Plough (the Big Dipper to Americans) and Cassiopeia (through which, it’s always useful to remember, the Milky Way passes). These stars are strictly the most local of the stars in our galaxy: from a few tens to hundreds or a few thousand light years away. If you ever get to see the Milky Way itself, which is now a rarity in our light-polluted cities but can still be managed out in the country on a good night, you won’t see stars, but just the impression of millions of them - or more exactly around 250 billion of them. The stars in the vast majority of our own galaxy are too far away for us to be able to see them individually.
This galaxy of ours has been around 13.5 billion years - since nearly the beginning of the universe (13.7 billion years): it is just one of perhaps 200 billion galaxies in the universe, each with hundreds of billions of stars in them. As the great Peter Cook once said, “As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realize how insignificant they are.” He was right, of course. Apart from some terrible gamma-ray burst from a distant supernova that happens to fry all life on Earth, none of those stars can possibly have any effect on us here on Earth. They are all just too far away. For instance, the nearest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, which at 4.22 light years away is around 41 trillion kilometres distant. In terms of the universe it is local, but I wouldn’t want to walk it.
Even when galaxies collide, as is predicted to happen when the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest galactic neighbour, smashes into the Milky Way in about four billion year’s time, it is extremely unlikely that any of its one trillion stars will collide with any of our 250 billion stars. Perhaps then, given the huge distances between us and any other star, the main effect of other stars on us humans is to make us appreciate our true and humble place in the scheme of things.
I would argue that our place is somewhat like the frogs in that damp Sardinian valley: making a lot of noise, but basically getting on with the job and ensuring that there are frogs in the valley for thousands of years to come.
The unfortunate thing is that we are progressively and inexorably poisoning the world. It has been found that fungicides, antibiotics, herbicides and insecticides are widely present in streams in Europe - and will no doubt be so around the world. Research revealed in 2013 that insecticides were devastating dragonflies, snails and other water-based species in the Netherlands. The pollution was so severe in places that the ditchwater itself could have been used as a pesticide.1 It’s possible that the frogs in the valley won’t be around in another 10,000 years. It’s also entirely possible that we won’t be around either. With our selfish ways, and our scant regard for ‘the commons,’ we have had quite an effect on the world, and seldom in a good way. Our children are now showing us the way forward, protesting at our inaction on climate change. Will we listen? Will we act?
