全文诵读音频（英式英语）
was wrong: When you gaze enough into the , the abyss does not gaze back into you. Instead, the , and in its . But when we into the infinite blackness that defines the expanse of our universe, we are offered a . We can in and disregard our in the of sheer cosmic dread. Or we can transform the of the cosmos into a that the uniqueness of everything we know here on Earth.
I’m a cosmologist, the kind of scientist who studies the , history and of the universe. I have spent my one part of the universe called cosmic voids: the expanses of nothing that between the galaxies. Most of our universe is void — 80 of the volume of the cosmos is made of nothing at all.
By strict of cosmic abundances, our planet and the life we find here amount to zero. . A small speck of blue and suspended in an of night, a bit of and water just another star. The great forces that our universe have grown the voids over of years, and their -day monstrousness puts cosmic insignificance into stark . Forget planets and stars; at these scales, galaxies are to of .
There is a when with the true scale of the cosmos, to at our world with . To feel that our great nothing. That our history to leave a mark. That our and anxieties are meaningless. That our very .
I have spent years to what cosmic voids teach us about the universe and its history. And my studies, I have to that temptation.
Yes, the universe is mostly void, but we have many in those great expanses. The voids don’t ; they define and to the galaxies that surround them. The of the voids — their and sizes and so on — the mysterious forces that the of the universe. We have that the voids cosmic that may the rest of the universe.
It’s true that in cosmic terms, Earth is neither large nor -lived. But that is only one way of . Compared with the voids, there is something on our planet, the only known in the universe where beings raise their eyes to the sky and .
Earth is the only known where — where can . It is the only known where , love, and joy . The only known where we can find dance, music, , and cosmology.
Our disagreements and jealousies and all the beautiful complexities that make us human aren’t meaningless. The and of the cosmic voids guarantee the — the stories and we fill our lives with are precisely because they will never happen in the expanse of most of the universe.
I have that the same lessons that cosmic voids teach us are in the voids we encounter in our own lives. Voids sharpen and define; they ; they are of potential. The we feel from is the of the gift of a life deeply loved. The silence before a performance begins is with anticipation. Our to news is necessary to allow us to on what matters.
Artists and philosophers have the of the void. The 12th- Buddhist monk and Saigyo on the gaps between raindrops, noting that the between their sounds were just as important as the drops themselves, if not more so. The John Cage challenged us with “4ʹ33ʺ,” a performance of silence, a of the void that sought to fill with coughs and , which its own music. The famed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas the utility of negative spaces, “Where there is nothing, everything is possible.”
Billions of years from now the sun will and Earth will to dust. The cosmic voids, of great nothingness, will . That fact, at first uncomfortable, gives us the to what we’re given.
Tell a to your friends. Fight for what you believe in. Call your mother. Create something the cosmos hasn’t seen before. The of the cosmic voids calls us to action. The universe won’t do anything for us give us the to . What we do with that is up to us. It is our to and .