Later, SSE from Mirach I was able to locate M33 as a faint, diffuse, and fat oval. Both of these were "first views" outside of the UCD "peek", and I was quite pleased. I have a bigger 10_in scope that I purchased several years ago, but it's proven problematic, so the smaller 8_in, legacy of a now-departed friend from the 1980's, has been my workhorse, has shown me the wonders of the universe.
NGC 253, M33, (old familiar) M31, and others are all spiral galaxies, "island universes" (term that dates back to Immanuel Kant in 1755, long before any true conception of the cosmos), "fluids of stars" (Carl Sagan), but most importantly, places. That they're a long ways off doesn't diminish their basic nature, not as pretty pictures but as stages immense for plays numberless.
That got me to thinking of Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, a powerful indictment of slavery; only here I'm instead focusing on the title itself. We're all citizens of Earth, all members of humanity (all others please announce yourselves...), but perhaps those two characterizations need not always be equivalent. As I've said in previous blogs, we need to be out there among the stars, to indeed be Citizens of the Milky Way, if for no other reason than that Bad Things can happen to planets. Spreading ourselves around increases the chances that we'll be around for the Long Haul.
And can we ever be Citizens of the Local Group (of galaxies, includes M31 & M33)? That seems unlikely. Just spreading to the far edges of our own fluid of stars will take so long that it seems to me most unlikely that we'll still be "human". Science fiction is full of variations on this theme; I have my favorites, anyone who reads the genre will have theirs. Given a "colonization speed" of 1% of the speed of light means we might reach the far border of the Milky Way in only seven or so million years. By contrast, there were no humans seven million years ago. A mere seven hundred thousand years ago there were, and we can reasonably conjecture that they were just as smart as we are. But they were incredibly staid; progress was just not in their gestalt. What to us seem obvious improvements (why did pre-colonial residents of the Andes never develop the wheel???) took them tens of thousands of years.
By contrast, UCSD professor Vernor Vinge defined the term "Singularity" in 1993 to describe an asymptotic curve of progress for us (see HTML or text for the paper); and before him Alvin Toffler in 1970 wrote Future Shock. Think about that last one. We're now living in Toffler's future. Progress is insatiable. If you own it, it's obsolete. If it's software, there's undoubtedly an update for it right now. Tomorrow will bring new ideas. "News" is a twenty-four-hour thing, and not something that you wait for, something that's printed on dead trees.
All this tells me that progress as concept, as reality, will be with us for the foreseeable future. And how much can we progress in seven million years? Would we of today even recognize those who reach the far edge of the galaxy, and look hungrily onward?
OK, shrink back to the here & now. What does this mean for us? The term "manifest destiny" has meant the subjugation of native peoples, destruction of irreplaceable ecosystems, and other Bad Things. But when there are no natives, no ecosystems, what then? In the absence of Anybody Else, it seems blatantly obvious to me that we humans (well, so far anyway) should be taking the galaxy, that it's our manifest destiny, as a species and as an intelligence.
And what do the "we" of today need to do for this? Survive. Exercise prudent stewardship of our own planet so that we can survive long enough to spread elsewhere. We're doing a (insert expletive of your choice here) poor job so far, in the process of pushing the cultural reset button right now. Some humans will probably survive the next few centuries, but our global culture and technology just won't do well with a multi-degree rise in temperate. We're not doing a good job here, gang.
Think about it. We're bright, we're ambitious. We could go far. But the manifest destiny of galactic stewardship is by no means inevitable. Most terrestrial (the only kind we know of) species that ever lived are extinct. It could happen to us.
Addendum: I've struggled over just two words in my entire BLOG for years. I can't seem to find a better pair for my belief that life, and in particular humanity & its descendents, will do its best to fill the unoccupied spaces, and that's a good thing. But "manifest destiny", the phrase is so overloaded. It's the language of the conqueror, of the subjugator, it's ugly. It simultaneously expresses my expansionist beliefs, and offends my egalitarian ones. { Sigh } As Mark Twain put it, "the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug", and this is definitely a small insect of a phrase.
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