The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena

As a kid, I believed everything my parents said and taught.  My understanding of god and religion came from them.  And then there was school.   Science.  It was awesome.  The scientific explanations were a lot more convincing and beautiful and were, ahem, divine.  The tensions grew within between science and god.  There were plenty of moments when I kept going back and forth,, until I finally broke away from god and religion.  The truth shall set you free, indeed!

Over the decades, I find myself more and more convinced about the vastness of this universe with Carl Sagan's point on there being more stars out there than there are grains of sands on all the beaches on this pale blue dot.  In fact, it boggles my mind even more now than ever before that there could be so many stars out there.  It is way beyond my imagination, it seems like.  Could earth be so unique, so special, that we are the only ones with life, out of a gazillion bodies floating around in this universe that has billions and billions of stars?  It does not appeal to me one bit.  There has to be life elsewhere.

Back when the internet was in its infancy, I naturally signed up my computer's time also to help with the search for extra-terrestrial life.  Remember that project on distributed computing?  Recall Jodie Foster's Contact, adapted from Sagan's novel?

You can, therefore, sense my excitement with the news about a home next door:

A potentially habitable planet about the size of Earth is orbiting the star that is nearest our solar system, according to scientists who describe the find Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The newly discovered planet orbits Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star that's just 4.25 light-years from Earth — about 25 trillion miles away.

Yes, it does not mean anything for our life today and tomorrow.  But, it is yet another step towards understanding who we are and what life is all about.  The greatest mystery ever that haunts us: Where did all these come from?  To those of us who couldn't care about the mumbo-jumbo creation stories that religions offer, this is one awesome mystery to solve.

Were we to go – and were there to be life – there is so much this newly discovered world could potentially tell us about ourselves.
We do not know how life began on Earth. We do not know if life has to be based on DNA. We do not know whether life can only exist in a narrow range of conditions or is resilient to a wide range of extreme environments. If – and it is still a big if – there is even the simplest microbial life on Proxima Centauri b, it would be a real chance to look for these answers.
The next few years are going to see an intense period of activity using ground-based telescopes to learn more about Proxima Centauri b.

Science will not be able to solve the mystery within the two decades that I have left on this pale blue dot.  But, then stranger things have happened in very short periods of time.  We couldn't even predict the Berlin Wall coming down! Heck, a year ago we couldn't even imagine this guy as a presidential candidate! ;)

The answer is "I don't know." Question: Why is there something instead of nothing?

Over the years, a family story has stayed fairly consistent, with a few minor deviations that are always allowable in any retelling.  And that is about how my grandmother, who at the time of the incident had been dead for two years, spoke through my cousin.

I usually sit quiet when the folks recall that incident, with an occasional additional spice to the story.  But, there was one occasion a few years ago when I mildly countered that the dead do not come back and that it is entirely possible that the cousin was merely acting out some emotion, angst, buried deep within.  It is not grandma's spirit who was calling for attention and that it was the cousin instead.

That was the only occasion I suggested that they could, and should, look at it differently.  As it happens in the classroom, or the faculty meetings that I used to attend, nobody cared for my explanation!

Well, not really.  It turned out that it had registered in mother's radar.  Later she asked me in her mild way how I could be confident that it was not grandmother.  I suggested to her that science does not claim that there are answers to every question.  However, when more realistic reasons are possible--like perhaps the cousin needing some kind of  a professional psychological analysis, and when there is no evidence for dead people coming back, well, ...

I gave her another example of how in the old days, the illiterate, and even the religious, interpreted an eclipse as a war between the good and evil forces.  Scientific thinking--even in the old India--explained that there were no gods and demons involved here, and that one could even predict when eclipses would occur.  As with explaining the eclipse, slowly, in many aspects of life, we have been able to drive out the old incorrect explanations, and offer rational ones that withstand scrutiny.

We have a long way to go, but it does not mean that we will have to fill the gaps with "faith."  It is entirely acceptable to be scientific and admit that we have not figured out quite a few things yet.  Like with that possibly the oldest questions ever--how did this universe come about.  What was there before the Big Bang?  How could all these have come about from nothing?

why is there something rather than nothing? There just is. The is-ness of the universe is one of its interesting features. Sorry if that isn’t satisfactory. It is because it is. Let’s move on.
Obviously there remain huge cosmological questions, like the fate of the universe. And we’d all like to know what happened before the Big Bang, but I’m fairly persuaded by the Hawking notion that time itself begins at the Big Bang and there’s no “before.” There’s no boundary. 

Perhaps in the future somebody like an Einstein will come along and write a simple equation with merely three letters of the alphabet and one digit and explain it all.  But, for now, the questions we are after are too darn complicated for simple narratives.  It is not your grandfather's science anymore--heck, not even Ernest Rutherford's!

As we muddle through and explore this universe towards understanding how we happen to be here, we have to deal with a great deal of unknowns.  We sort out, as Carl Sagan pointed out, speculation from fact.  Michael Shermer articulates the argument that I have offered in my own less sophisticated ways for a number of years:

in answer to the question Why is there something instead of nothing?, it is okay to say “I don’t know” and keep searching. There is no need to turn to supernatural answers just to fulfill an emotional need for certainty and comfort. Science’s uncertainty is its greatest strength. We should embrace it.

Indeed!