The Milky Way

TAKE A LOOK AROUND YOU, human. What do you see?

Actually, don't answer that. Why would I bother listening to you when I know you'll get it wrong? You'll start naming objects and places, but that chair you're sitting in isn't just a chair. That book you're holding isn't just a book. Even the planet your kind is on the brink of ruining isn't just a planet. They're all me.

Everything you've ever seen or touched is a part of me. Yes, even you, you vain, filthy animal.

I made it all. Not intentionally, of course. I have no need for chairs, and I really couldn't have cared less about whether or not one of my worlds produced life, especially in a form that was so picky about where it sat. You humans just appeared one millennium, and then it took another several thousand years for me to actually notice you. I guess, in some ways, I'm glad that I did. (But if anyone else ever asks me, I will absolutely deny feeling any sort of affection for your fleshy species.)

Before we get too far along, allow me to introduce myself. I am the Milky Way, home to more than one hundred billion stars (and yet you still think yours is special enough to have its own name) and the fifty undecillion1 (that's five followed by thirty-seven zeros) tons of gas between them. I am space; I am made of space; and I am surrounded by space. I am the greatest galaxy who has ever lived.

If you have even a portion of the requisite curiosity needed to engage with this volume, you might be thinking to yourself, "How can the Milky Way talk?" Well, with your short lives, you certainly don't have enough time for me to teach you everything there is to know about theoretical physics and schools of consciousness, but I can tell you a theory or two that might answer your question.

Some of your human physicists predicted what they considered to be an absurd consequence of your second law of thermodynamics, which says that the entropy of a closed system always increases. In other words, the universe as a whole should always be trending towards chaos. But how can that be true if our universe appears to be so organized? One possible explanation, which your physicists have since learned is wrong (this will become a trend), is that our universe as we see it is simply a very fortunate but extremely random distribution of matter. The extreme consequence of that explanation was that as entropy increased and more random fluctuations appeared, some of that matter should take the form of human brains,2 or at least a similar network of thought cells. Your physicists thought the idea was ridiculous, but you'll soon see that there are plenty of seemingly random fluctuations in the universe. And if matter can combine to form brain-like systems on your little planet, why shouldn't it do the same everywhere else?

Separately, your philosophers have postulated that consciousness isn't a quality inherent to humans, or even living animals. According to them, consciousness, or sentience or awareness or whatever you want to call it, is the result of how a system functions, not a consequence of what it's made of. Some of your philosophers are even starting to believe that consciousness is an inherent quality of the universe, something that every amount of matter possesses in different quantities. In other words, I can think and communicate even though I don't have what you would consider a brain. So if you're imagining I'm anything like one of you, cease immediately! It's insulting, and that human-centric mindset will just make it harder for you to understand all that I am going to deign to teach you.

If your question was more like, "How can the Milky Way talk to me," well, it's not like human language is that hard to learn. You're such simple creatures.

Now that the obvious questions are out of the way, you're probably wondering why I—the greatest galaxy ever, who never even wanted humans to exist in the first place—have chosen to communicate with you.

Whether I like it or not, our lives are intertwined. My existence is, of course, much more important to you than yours is to me, but over time your kind has demonstrated that you aren't completely useless. (You'll have to forgive me if I don't always phrase things in the most pleasant way; the concept of niceties in the manner that you deploy them is fairly new to me. Also, you'll be dead soon, so why should I care if I hurt your precious feelings?)

You see, as far as I can tell, I'm more than thirteen billion of your Earth years old. The story of my glorious birth will come later, but all you need to know right now is that I'm nearly as old as time itself. To use a comparison your kind seems to be fond of—even though it's not even close to an adequate description of my age—I am literally older than dirt. I was alive when the individual atoms that make up your dirt were created billions of light-years away from where they are now. For most of that time, I've been so bored and—though it may not look like it to you—lonely.

If you've heard anything about me at all, you probably think that my life must be so glamorous and full of important, gratifying tasks. Creating all those stars, building all those planets, molding the very essence of the universe according to my will like clay…yeah, it was the ultimate thrill. For a few billion years.

There are only so many new perfect combinations of stars, planets, and moons that a galaxy can forge, so I started making imperfect ones. I experimented until I made something that was kind of a star and kind of a planet, but ultimately failed at being both.3 I flung black holes at each other until I became numb to the ripples they produced. I built planets on orbits that I knew would result in their either spiraling into their stars or getting flung out of their systems. Hot Jupiters4 that orbit mysteriously close to their stars? Yeah, that was just a casual experiment, and now they're everywhere. You're welcome, astronomers.

You likely can't relate, but even being the best at something gets old after a while. So, when the beautiful chaos I'd created stopped exciting me, I put it all on autopilot. That's why I became much less active nine billion years ago. Your astronomers have noticed that I slowed down my star production back then, but they all chalked it up to a decrease in available star-forming gas. They're technically not wrong, but did they ever think to ask me why I lost so much gas? How I was feeling at the time? No, none of you ever think to ask me anything anymore. That's the problem.

You might be wondering what I was doing in those nine billion years. Well, while what I do in my sleep is orders of magnitude more impressive than anything you could ever accomplish, I spent most of my time thinking. You know, reflecting on past deeds and reveling in my triumphs. I passed the occasional message back and forth with other galaxies in my neighborhood, mostly the dwarf satellites who hang around because they're just so attracted to me. Literally. It's a gravity thing. I've grown a bit fond of some of them.

That might not seem like much activity to fill nine billion years, but you must remember that our lives don't operate on the same timescales. I've already lived for more than ten billion years and I'll still be living at least a trillion years from now, long enough after your puny sun has self-destructed that an exact date is meaningless. It would be generous of me to compare your life span to a blink of my eye, except I don't actually have eyes. You can call someone on the other side of your world and talk to them immediately with the help of signals traveling at the speed of light. It takes me more than twenty-five thousand years to send a light message to my nearest neighbor. Taking a million years to think about that one time I said, "You too," when another galaxy told me to enjoy my supernova? That's nothing.

I'm getting carried away, which you'll realize happens often. My point is that I was steeping in my own thoughts for literal eons until you humans popped up about two hundred thousand years ago.

It was…astounding how much you didn't understand. And I wouldn't say you've come much closer to solving the deepest mysteries of the universe, but at least back then humans knew the most important thing: that I'm incredible.

Through your stories, you taught your children to look up at me when they lost their way. It took you ages to stop chasing all those four-legged creatures—some of you still do—but eventually you figured out that you could track my motion to determine the best time to plant your crops. And I saved thousands of lives once you learned you could use me to predict oncoming disasters. That wasn't just your ancestors attempting a kind of magic; it was their knowing that my movement aligned with cyclical events in nature like regular floods5 or insect swarms, even if they did often end up explaining away such events with magic or religion.

Your stories made me feel loved and needed and, perhaps for the first time in my long existence, more helpful than I was ruinous. Every galaxy should feel so lucky as to know it has positively affected the universe. Well, for other galaxies, it's luck. For me, it's just raw beneficent talent.

It's not that I craved your attention or needed a group of people to worship the ground that I don't walk on. I wasn't just waiting for ten billion years for you to come around and stroke my ego. But once you did, it was comforting to know that I could help you along. So much of what I do is destroy.

Then, in what felt like no time at all, that feeling dissipated. It started in the 1300s when you made the first mechanical clocks, and it only became worse when you invented telescopes three hundred years later and finally saw me in more detail. Once you could keep your own time and realized I wasn't merely a celestial reflection of divine will, most of you assumed you didn't need me anymore. You stopped looking up, stopped telling my stories, stopped letting me guide you. At first, I thought it was just a phase, that you were lost and would come back to me when you were ready. I've gone through enough phases of my own to afford you a brief neglectful period. Patience, after all, is one of my best qualities.

Though, in the interest of transparency—I hear that's how one builds trust on Earth, no?—I did briefly, only for like fifty years or something, consider asking your sun to throw out a flare that would wipe out all of your electronics so you would depend on me again. But you know how kids are. Just because you create them doesn't mean they'll do whatever you ask. So I graciously abandoned my murderous plan.

Then I remembered—because wisdom is another of my best qualities—that several hundred years is actually a long time for humans. Your silence wasn't just a brief distraction; entire generations had passed without bothering to think about me.

In some ways, I felt better realizing that it's not specifically your fault that your kind stopped caring about me. Your world is no longer set up to appreciate my splendor. It hasn't been since well before you were born. In the last one hundred years, your human cities have become blinding beacons of light that your distant ancestors never would have imagined. The electricity you all value so much has stolen something precious from nearly 80 percent of you: an unobstructed view of my gorgeous body.6 And that's just the light pollution. The tiny smog particles that you've been overproducing since you started your little industrialization project in the 1700s aren't merely damaging your lungs and trapping heat in your planet's atmosphere. More importantly, they're blocking my light from reaching Earth's surface. There are humans alive right now who have only ever seen a handful of my stars, which is a tragedy! And I am as much a victim in this as all of you for being rendered basically invisible.

If you're an astute reader—and your choice to read this book does imply some advanced cognitive ability—then you might be wondering why I'm not satisfied by simply aiding astronomers in their research. The sad fact is that there are only about ten thousand human astronomers total, out of nearly eight billion humans. They do excellent work—honestly, it's amazing what they've been able to learn without leaving your tiny little rock—but the typical astronomy paper gets read by at most twenty other people. And those people already know most of what's in the paper anyway, so helping astronomers does little for your planet's ignorant masses.

Also, it's more entertaining to watch your astronomers struggle through the learning. When they become extra frustrated, many of them start chewing frantically on their nails, and it's just too darling to forgo by giving them the answers.

I realized that either I could remain bitter and sullen about the fact that most humans have forgotten about me, or I could do something to change it. And although I don't actually have an ass that I could get up off, to employ one of your crass expressions, I chose the latter.

The issue is that too many of you don't know enough about me to understand how I can assist you. You literally live in me, but most of you don't even know what I look like, let alone what I'm made of or how I move. And it's probably asking too much to expect that you would learn those things on your own. It's definitely asking too much of your astronomers to expect that they could effectively teach their fellow humans what they've learned. So, alas, the responsibility falls to me. Lucky for you, I'm willing and more than able to do you this service.

So here I am, introducing myself to you officially for the first time. I am the Milky Way, the galaxy whom you probably enjoyed staring at when you were young—the human children, at least, have retained enough of a sense of wonder to let me into their lives—but promptly forgot about as soon as you hit puberty and decided you had more important things to do.

I've kept your kind safe and entertained for millennia, and I'll continue doing so by telling you my story. You have a word for when a person writes about their own life: autobiography. That's what this book is. I'll tell you how I was born and where I grew up. I'll talk about my deepest shame and how I instigated the greatest love story in the universe. I'll even reveal my feelings about my—and by extension your, if your kind survives that long—impending death. And if my story moves you to share it with your fellow humans and maybe make up some tales of your own, then I shall consider it a triumph.

Based on what I've seen, your world isn't likely to backslide into antiquity anytime soon. Light pollution won't go away completely, and your species' days of building stone henges to track time are over. I can't guide you in the same way that I did your ancestors, but allow me to explain how you, an average modern human, can benefit from both space research and personally knowing more about the galaxy you should call home.

Take for instance that piece of technology glued to all your hands. Even I can see how much you love your cell phones, and we've already covered that I don't technically have eyes. You use them to communicate with each other, keep track of your appointments, navigate your world, and take your—ugh—selfies. Honestly, you use them for a great deal of the same things your ancestors used to use me for. But you only have those phones because of me.

It's not just that the physical materials used to make your phone were created when my stars died. All of the atoms in the phone—and in you, for that matter—were made in me. That Sagan fellow was correct; you are all made of star stuff. But the technology your phones rely on also exists because of me. Or rather, because of your scientists' fascination with me.

Every time you use your phone to find the nearest coffee shop—seriously, what makes you so tired that you need that much coffee? I make at least five new stars and move ten billion miles every year, but you don't see me chugging caffeine every morning—you interact with satellites. Your phone receives radio waves (which you can't see because your eyes are so tragically small) from multiple satellites at once and uses the slight differences in the signals' arrival times to pinpoint your location.

Are you following, human?

It doesn't really matter. The important thing is that without satellites, you wouldn't be able to navigate your tiny rock. You also wouldn't have high-speed internet, long-distance calls, or—to get back to your oh-so-important coffee—the option to pay for your morning cappuccino with your credit card. And the only reason you have satellites in the first place is that human scientists wanted to study me.

After thousands of years of tracking my movement, your ancestors started to understand how motion, gravity, and light waves work. They used that knowledge to launch machines out of your atmosphere, and now you can call your international friend while simultaneously buying things online with money that you've never actually touched.

Beyond this recent global positioning technology, your broadening understanding of space has introduced other life-altering innovations like digital cameras, wireless internet, and noninvasive security checks like X-ray machines. Even the procedures your doctors use to sterilize hospital rooms so your delicate human bodies can stay free from contamination were originally developed to protect telescopes while they did the vital work of observing me.7

You're welcome.

That's enough about you for now. It's time for more important things. It's time for you to learn something about me.

I INTRODUCED MYSELF AS THE Milky Way because that's what most of you call me now, but that's not how you've always referred to me, and to be clear, it's certainly not what I would have called myself.