The questions we face in front of the stars

The highest point La Palma (Canary Islands) is about 2400 meters, in Roque de los Muchachos, rocks that look like human figures at a distance and with a little bit of noise. ;imagination. Here you can breathe pure air like Arequipa, the land where I was born, and it is very beautiful to contemplate, at the bottom, at our feet, a carpet of clouds that stretches like a sea in every sense up to the distant horizon. But the most picturesque of the place is perhaps a sociable raven posing coquettishly for tourist photos in exchange for a handful of food.

Apparently, this piece of land has the most diaphanous atmosphere in Europe and perhaps the world. this explains the existence of the Observatory, made up of gigantic solar and nocturnal telescopes built on this summit by different countries, and which, since the mid-eighties of the last century, has attracted astronomers from all over the world. the planet. They are strange beings, who sleep by day and work at night, and who, like the vampires, operate in the shade and the light that guides them is not of this world but of up there, very high, I mean the one they emit or emitted millions of years ago the stars that sail (or sailed before disappearing) for the infinite universe.

If the beauty of this island, one of the smallest of the Canary Islands, with its forests, beaches, hills and natural parks it is great during the day, the real miracle takes place when the darkness falls, when the sky is populated by an infinite myriad of stars, constellations, planets, lights that sizzle and go out and light up and, as in the borgiano aleph, one takes the huge awareness that there , above his head, has the infinite universe. The thing is even more spectacular when, with the help of telescope lenses, you start to navigate the sidereal spaces and get close to these cars and, for example, you have the impression of being able to see them. to be an astronaut who walks in the rough sky of the moon, among gigantic craters, the work of the fireballs that bomb it for millions of years that this agglomeration of planets has.

I think in the two days that I just spent there I learned more things than in any other trips I 've made in my life. For example, nothing resembles literature as much as astronomy because, in the imagination as well as in knowledge, without it, it would not progress at all. The astronomers of the Observatory and, especially, its director, Professor Rafael Rebolo López, armed with patience and wisdom, give eloquent answers to all my questions, which always raise new questions and, in this way, the conversation skips the weak frontier which, in this discipline, separates (and often confuses) the physics of metaphysics.

Is not it overwhelming and crippling to work in a field that encompbades the infinite infinite, timeless time that is eternity? Yes maybe. But to avoid this paralysis, the theory of
big bang which poses a starting point – an explosion of matter that occurred more than thirteen billion years ago and which continues its everlasting expansion through l & # 39; space without term – and at this eternity are incompatible, allows scientists to work with less uncertainty. And if the theory of
big bang is popperianamente "falsified" at some point? Another will come out that will rectify what has been accomplished up to here and allow for progress in a different way. Is not it the story of all sciences without exception?

Do astronomers come to find life or the symptoms of life in another star of the universe? No, in none. But this does not allow us to definitively state that only the Earth has such a privilege, among other things because scientists have found in scattered stars in different parts of space almost all the constituents necessary for life . So such a discovery – having parents in a lost corner of the universe – could happen at some point in the future. And to see if these Venusian or Martian humanoids resemble those of science fiction or are more original than those invented by literary fantasy!

What are the odds that the little planet Earth disappears under the impact of a gigantic Aerolito that would be thousands of times larger than the one that fell through Siberia about a century ago devastating a huge territory? Many, if we take into account the fact that "accidents" are very often recorded in the sidereal space, that is to say gigantic hecatombs that result from the deviations of their orbits, or lack of orbits, in the trajectories of some rebel formations; and little if we consider that this has not happened yet in the very long history of the Earth star. But, of course, as a hypothesis, could happen tomorrow and return everything that exists in our environment to nothing that came out a few million years ago. Seen from the point of view of the stars, how stupid and minimal the wars and all the violence of which the history of humanity is permeated.

I ask the group who surrounds me what percentage of astronomers are believers and, after having changed their minds. , they tell me that probably 20 percent; the others are agnostics or atheists. One of these friends quickly makes the difference: "I am a believer". He adds: "And I feel perfectly at ease to reconcile my religion with anything that discovers or rejects science."

It is true that he says without a doubt, and this also applies to this fifth of astronomers whose faith resists daily comparison to which their religious beliefs are subject to revelations – I do not know if call them big or terrible – which makes them stars. But I understand better the other four fifths of the scientists whose daily work is filled with doubts and vacillations concerning the ideas propagated by the religions on the supreme being who would have created all these constellations and all that exists. Because human beings adore or worship tiny, facing this overwhelming spectacle of billions and billions of stars sown along a borderless, gravitational and supporting, illuminating or receiving, and poorly explanatory religions invented for these inexplicable questions: how was all this possible? Could it be that chance, conjunctions and mysterious constitutions are coincidences which, suddenly, in this icy universe, have sprouted life here in this little planet without its own light of ours? Is it more or less convincing that it was not chance but a superior being, gifted with infinite wisdom, who, perhaps bored of his eternal loneliness, created this dark wonder that is human history? The best answers – the most beautiful and imaginative – to these questions, may not be in the stars or in religion, but in literature.