Six Billion Points of Light

When we look out at a cloudless, moonless night sky far from city lights, it’s amazing how many stars there are visible to the naked eye. Even the planet Uranus is visible in this setting (if it’s above the horizon). But one of the more remarkable things in the sky is the Milky Way, which is just a view from our perspective of the more densely stellar-populated sections of our own galaxy. We can directly see how stars are distributed in the sky, at least above the horizon, and extrapolate what they are like below the horizon (for example, if the Sun on a hot summer noontime is above me, then it, at midnight, is straight down below). Just because stars “set” in the west doesn’t mean that they disappear, although as a child I emotionally felt that, even though I intellectually knew better. With this in mind, I’d like to play an “imagination game” for a few minutes.

Every living human being on earth is, at this moment in time, located in a specific place. From where I am, I can theoretically point to any individual on Earth (or even the few that are supposedly undergoing alien abductions out in space). Naturally, for nearly the entire Earth’s population, I would have to do this without the benefit of sight, since people are hidden because of factors like distance and physical obstacles (including the Earth’s curvature). But if somehow every human being emitted a type of light that passed straight through opaque matter, how would the distribution of humanity appear from my own perspective, where I am now located? I submit that the effect would resemble our night sky, except that the lights would be from below instead of above. Also, since the nearest people would emit the brightest lights, those brightest individual lights would be at or slightly below the horizon. They would also be clustered together in certain zones that reflected densely populated areas. And as I looked further down and around, I would see something like the Milky Way representing more distant densely populated areas. But as long as I stay put where I am, then, unlike the night sky, these human “stars” will not rise and set like the celestial ones. Instead, the brightest will change their positions and brightness very erratically, while the lower “Milky Way-like” hazes will remain largely unchanged.

If I looked straight down, there would be no lights, but with me facing north, a little to the left of straight down would show increasing clusters of lights, indicated that my imaginary gaze is sweeping eastern across Australia. About sixty degrees north of straight down, there would be an enormously bright patch of “human haze”, representing the Far East. Another bright patch, reflecting Western Europe and its dense population, would be much closer to the horizon, in the northeast direction. America’s own population centers would shine just below the horizon from my north-northeast to the west-northwest. But most of the area below me would be empty or almost empty, reflecting our vast oceans and sparsely population areas. Indeed, although humanity is very adaptable to vastly different living conditions and climates, we tend to bunch up together to an extreme level in some places!

Now what is the point of all this? Aside from the fact that I have a tendency to drift off into reverie, this exercise points out that humanity is “out there” like the stars, even if we can’t see it. As humans, we tend to be tribal by nature, ascribing traits of legitimacy and importance more to those we can see and be around the most, while those who never cross our sights don’t seem quite as “real”. I think this is one of the problems we have when there is a war going on somewhere in the world, but all we seem to care about are the casualties that our own country accrues, which, although they are important to be sure, usually pale in comparison to the amount of suffering incurred by the population at the site of that conflict. And wars that we don’t have forces directly involved in? They might as well not exist, for all of the attention we give them. The same goes for natural disasters as well. In 1969, Hurricane Camille devastated coastal Mississippi, bringing about 259 deaths, a tragedy no doubt. But the following year a hurricane (cyclone) hit East Pakistan (soon to be Bangladesh), killing around 100,000 people! But very few people over here even knew that this occurred, much less cared about it! Nowadays, though, the situation has changed somewhat (but not enough). Look at the extensive coverage given the tsunami that killed more than 100,000 in Southern and Southeast Asia in 2005. This is due, of course, in large part to the more speedy and mobile communications technology that is progressively binding the population of our planet together more tightly and intricately. To the extent that we can respond more appropriately to emergencies affecting others not in our own area, this is a good thing. Anything that helps us to see the others dwelling on Earth with us as equally legitimate and valuable individual human beings, no matter how disconnected in distance or culture they may seem to us, only bodes well for our future collective survival and prosperity.