Other Cosmos

Abstract

The ancients thought of Earth as the center of the cosmos; they couldn’t imagine mundane worlds beside our own. The invention of the telescope changed all that, revealing that the planets and so-called fixed stars are just as central and tangible as Earth. In our own century, using increasingly powerful devices, we have extended the postulated limits of space even farther. We now believe that the universe consists of an enormous quantity of galaxies, arranged into clusters and superclusters. With each innovation our universe has seemingly gotten bigger and bigger.

In infinite space many civilizations are bound to exist, among them societies that may be wiser and more “successful” than ours. I support the cosmological hypothesis which states that the development of the universe is repeated in its basic characteristics an infinite number of times. Yet we should not minimize our sacred endeavors in this world, where, like faint glimmers in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of dark unconsciousness into material existence.

—Andrei Sakharov, 1975 Nobel Peace Prize Lecture