Lost in Space: On wayfinding for wanderers
Section 1: Fitting In
Author’s note: This is the first section of what I hope will be an early chapter in a book about galaxies, their impact on me, and their relevance to all of our everyday lives. More sections to come in the coming weeks!
In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round … do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. … Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. – Henry David Thoreau
Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. That must be it, I thought – to lose your direction is to lose your face. – Ralph Ellison
Section 1: Fitting In
If you want to learn about galaxies and the cosmos and stuff, you’d better take a seat and spend some time getting oriented. Else the universe a big place, and you might get lost. People want to jump to the hot stuff – black holes, dark matter, and the like, but how can you find it if you don’t know where to look or how to steer? You don’t want it to be like that time in high school before GPS when I thought I knew where I was going, but a left turn and then a right – and then was it two lefts? and suddenly I’m on a road that just keeps shrinking: two lanes, then one lane, then just gravel, and a two track – this can’t be right – and then definitely a dead end in the literal middle of a corn field. This is not Bay City.
I’ve spent over a decade as an astronomer trying to make sense of outer space, and have ended up a lot more lost than outside Bay City. So yeah, though my college students complain about it, we have to spend some time wondering about how we know where we are. How do we know where to look, where to go, and for that matter, where we’re coming from?
I’m sure you already know some of it. Here on earth we have a bunch of ways of getting our bearings. For one, we cut up space into shapes and regions like kindergartners armed with scissors: we cut North America into 23 countries, the United States into 50 states. Illinois has 102 counties - a patchwork quilt of Boones and Calhouns and even DeKalb and DuPage - and DuPage itself has 9 townships and 39 municipalities. If you’re from Illinois these probably even mean something. The point is that cutting up earth’s surface into defined regions is a pretty convenient way to get a sense of where we are. And might I even say a sense of belonging. Though I now live in Chicago, Illinois, USA, I grew up in Ada Township in Kent County in the state of Michigan in the United States. And just the other week I was in Seattle for my brother-in-law’s wedding (you know, in Washington State, Northwest USA, North America), and started talking with a guy in a bar. Turns out he also grew up in Ada Township, by that gas station with the dressed up moose statue just down the street! We bonded, two otherwise strangers knit together by our memories of that same patch of planet earth.
Now, Astronomers do this cutting exercise too, using something else you’ve heard of: constellations. You probably know that a constellation is a pattern of stars in the sky, usually forming some only mildly recognizable shape: a large bear, a swan, a dragon. Perhaps you’ve even used an app on your phone to find some. But to professional astronomers constellations are like the states of the sky. We split the entire night sky into 88 regions, each region named after the mythological character they contain. Each name then, gives a sense of place, so an astronomer saying the nebula M42 is in Orion is like saying that Rocky Mountain National Park is in Colorado: when we look in they sky we find M42 in the same apparent region of space as the stars of Orion.
It’s probably worth noting that choosing 88 regions was somewhat contentious in 1928, not wholly different from the process of, e.g., defining state lines (did you know Michigan and Ohio had a war over Toledo? Look it up!). Like what do you do about the star Alpheratz, part of the belly of Pegasus, the horse, but also the head of the princess Andromeda? We can’t have overlap in our regions. So which constellation gets it, and which one gets cut out? Well, Delta Pegasi is no more, and Alpha Andromeda is an official star. So the princess won. But did Alpheratz like the choice? Did it feel itself divided, never more to be whole, like the habitats sliced apart by the new I-69? We never asked.
But it might have cared. Some people did. Because being part of a constellation carries meaning. It’s more than just a region of space. Sure, some people caution that the universe is 3D, so the stars and galaxies in a constellation usually are at very different distances, and don’t have any physical association. But that doesn’t make it void of information: it still tells astronomers quite a lot. You’re a star in Sagittarius? That means you’re in the disk of the Milky Way Galaxy, interior to earth’s orbit. You are likely a comparatively young star, with more heavy elements than average. And you might be brighter than you look – there’s a lot of dust blocking our view in that direction. Or you’re a galaxy from Virgo? Well, if you’re anywhere in the neighborhood of the Milky Way that means that you are probably moving at a ridiculous relative speed as a result of the strong gravity of the Virgo Cluster. And we probably can’t measure your distance well unless you’re actually in the cluster.
Not that this is any different from the way we function here on earth. Regions of course connotate more than just an area of space. When I told you I was from Michigan did you automatically guess some things about me (e.g. I like cold, venison, and say ope a lot?). Or maybe you remember some story: oh Michigan - that’s a political battleground state - didn’t Donald Trump argue with the governor?
You see, regions, like constellations, can group things together that might otherwise be far apart. Thus things as different as the Detroit Lions and Sleeping Bear Dunes are tied together by their connection to Michigan; Michiganders (yes, that’s a real word - don’t laugh) are proud of both (well, as proud as you can be of a team that’s won 1 playoff game since my dad was born in 1961). And it can works the other way too: groups within a region can come to define it. Here in Chicago Chinatown or Ukrainian Village didn’t just get those names because they sounded nice.
When I think about constellations I think about the constellation of social connections and connotations that I carry with me each hour, each conversation, each embarrassed glance. And I think about how I orient myself by drawing boundaries through those connections, forming groups that I use to define people, and that I use to define me. Violinist, Professor, Christian, White, Toilet Paper Roll Over, - heck, I even lump myself with fellow Virgos. And the people I meet of course define my groups. It’s no wonder Claude Steele writes about the psychological concept of “stereotype threat,” the idea that people (sometimes unconsciously) feel the burden of representing groups we associate with when we are in the minority. We are affected by the risk of confirming negative stereotypes about groups we identify with. Study after study shows this. Take for example, a study of Asian women, who performed significantly worse on math tests when they were subtly reminded before the test about their gender, and significantly better when they were reminded about their race. Being a woman often carries a negative stereotype regarding mathematical ability, while being Asian has a positive stereotype regarding math. It probably wasn’t even conscious, but their perceived place in their group mattered.
This matters for everyone, though some people it’s an occasional discomfort, for others, their lived experience. Like for me, I might feel a need to represent my group - blond, white dutch guys - well when attending the occasional anti-racists education events that still somehow end up being mostly black people there. Don’t mess up. But for others, in those constellations that are almost always in the minority, it’s amazing they shine as bright as they do. I think about one student I had, let’s call him Deion, who was the hardest worker in our freshman cohort of physics students. He was thoughtful, studious, attended every office hour, working and working and working. And yet, he, as the only black kid in a constellation of whiteness, carried an extra burden. A burden of association, of history. He transferred to a more multicultural department. I would have too, but I’m saddened by the weight of our boundaries. I mean, I remember moving to northwest Indiana, with all the advantages and privileges of being a well educated white guy, and still realizing how my groups defined me. These people don’t think like me. They already have their friends. Even attending bar trivia at that smoky hole of a place they call the Franklin House most Wednesday nights, it was hard to fit in. You might be a bright star, but it’s your role in the pattern that ultimately matters.
Thinking about it now, that constellations reflect something about ourselves is perhaps obvious. Whatever lines we put on the sky, whatever boundaries we draw, they ultimately come from our imagination. They are only as real as we make them. John Barentine writes that constellations “are a distinctly human invention, dictated by culture, an imagination, rather than being the result of any physical process. How and why we ended up with a sky full of mythical heroes and fantastical beasts says much more about the human condition than it tells us anything useful about how the heavens are constructed.” Indeed, that most official constellations come from stories familiar to the western world must at least in part reflect the primarily American and European make up of the International Astronomical Union in 1928. And so much more - a whole history full or relationships and politics and stories that defy sweeping generalizations and would take years to unpack.
Turns out, it’s a big universe out there, so we try to give it order by slicing it up and seeing how we fit. Constellations quell the chaos: their boundaries trap their patterns and their stories - our patterns, and our stories.
Interesting start Luke! I like the astronomy ties to bigger meaning.