Sky is not the limit

Throwing up your hands and arching your head heav enwards may be an act of desperation or surrender. But you are unwittingly performing an exercise in astronomy. Or perhaps, astronomy took off from the helplessness of man, who, downed by and drowned in earthy pains, was forced to look skywards for succour and ended up wondering about those twinkling diamonds up above the world so high. Well, on 25 August, 1609, 400 years back, that endeavour was made a bit easier with the unveiling of the Telescope by Galileo Galilei to the merchants of Venice. Along with Kepler’s discovery around the same time that planetary orbits are elliptical and not circular, the two events, according to the Economist, ‘can be seen as the beginning of modern astronomy’. Indeed, 2009 has been declared the International Year of Astronomy, to commemorate the landmark (skymark?) anniverssary.

But sky-gazing is as old as humanity. And the roots of astronomy, even in its present modern form, run deeper than mere four hundred years. If astronomy is the study of those realms where time and space merge, most aptly embodied in the measuring of such distances in ‘Light years’, mankind’s tryst with that science has quite a vintage. Several ancient civilisations like the Greek, Incas, Mayan, Egyptian, Chinese, Hebrew and Vedic had made phenomenal advancements in the field of astronomy. But here I will blow only Bharat’s trumpet, owing to the limitations of, well, time and space! The intent of course is not to rob GG of the credits: His T’scope surely stretched the spacescape beyond the naked eyes’ scope. What were hithertofore based on observation, perception, religion, revelations, arithmetic or even enlightened guesswork also became subjects of visual verification, thanks to him. That said, Galileo was a major milestone in mankind’s space mission, but certainly not the launchingpad.

The sceptical modern mind has unfortunately dismissed Indian astronomy too along with astrology which invariably raises its hackles. But the former was always an evolved science here. The Rig Veda talks of the centrality of the sun in the solar system, several sun-like stars that ‘rise in the night’ and also the force of ‘akarshan’ (gravity) that keeps objects, on earth and elsewhere, in place. Indians since ancient times have believed in the cyclical nature of universe with its tendency for coming into being and dissolving as also expanding and contracting, thus forming an eternal loop. Says Carl Sagan: ‘A millenium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Indians billions’. Astronomers like Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta, Bhaskara, Varahamihira, to name a few, had made ‘giant leaps’ in space science with rudimentary technology. The spherical shape of Earth, its circumference, its rotation on an axis and revolutions around the sun, spatial distances, eclipses et al were part of routine knowledge long before Galileo or Copernicus. Many works of such Indian astronomers were translated in Latin and Arabic. Nalanda from where A’bhatta graduated was a key global centre for astronomy too. Besides Jantar Mantar, there were dime a dozen observatories littered all over India. But the Mughal rule and the advent of the British almost put paid to this legacy.

The sulk continues in the present and Bharat’s trumpet unfortunately has given way to the sorrowful sarangi: its past pre-eminence in the astronomy sweepstakes can fill only history books and nostalgic hearts. For all its inherited wisdom, modern India languishes in a vacuum, with our star-gazers slipping into sleep mode. The conference of the International Astronomical Union, held in Rio recently hardly had any Indian presence. This body is the one that decides on the fates of heavenly bodies, their status and names. Much planetary politics and polemics are played out on its platforms. It was during the last conference at Prague that Pluto was pushed out from its exalted perch on the planetary pedestal. While many expected Pluto’s shadow to eclipse the current meet also, better counsel prevailed. The debates veered around more space-shattering issues, like methodology, for one: Many astronomists rued the displacement of observation and human wisdom by data mining and robots. Hubble, the NASA’s eye in the sky, for instance, is turning out endless data, but there is a critical backlog of human intelligence to decipher them.

Yet there is much excitement out/up there. Pluto may have been booted out of the planetary pantheon, but its exit seems to have been more than compensated in the space scheme of things. In fact, many billion times more, or to be very, very precise, infinite times more! Humans may call their habitat ‘uni’verse in all hubris, but sorry, we seem outnumbered: It now ‘appears’ there are so many such ‘universes’ in our neighbourhood and beyond, containing countless galaxies embedded with innumerable solar systems each with its own sun, planets and satellites that the reigning nomenclature is ‘multiverse’. Aah, if indeed, all we see is maya there are multitudes of mayas around. And if such bodies abound, what about life on them? The search for aliens is well and truly on. Says Newsweek:‘Instead of they coming to us as in Hollywood movies, it is we who are after them now’. Of course, the search starts with water for it is assumed that if there is water there should be life. That argument is faulty. What if alien life can thrive without H2O or have alternatives, now that the possibilities are endless and no scientific wisdom can be deemed final? That will be good to know what with our own taps and topography running out of that precious liquid. And that should bring us down to earth.

I am looking for some lost things in space that no telescope or satellite can reveal. The prices of milk, vegetables, pulses and sundry other food items just shot through the roof, breached stratosphere and skyrocketed to God knows where. But I am sure even He can’t afford them. Now, will those come down in response to the ‘gravity’ of our situation? There are also certain other things floating in space: daydreams, nightmares, high hopes, bloated egos etc which too would do well to touch ground zero. Incidentally, astronomy is not the only fallout of a helpless heaven-ward heave. There is another spin-off from star-gazing and moon-watching: poetry. But all I could manage was some prosaic prose … to fill my space and your time.

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