Bullis’s talk on the universe intriguing

In the universe astronomers know today, there is life in only one location: Earth. Scientists are searching for signs of life on the nearly five thousand planetary systems that have been discovered so far.

They have already found half a dozen “Cinderella” planets that have just the right combination of temperature and the presence of liquid water that are considered necessarily for life to exist.

Huge radio telescopes survey the sky day and night continuously, looking for any signals that suggest there is another civilisation advanced enough to use radio or other waves to communicate. Alas, so far no ETs have waved back.

Last Thursday, August 11, the Makhanda hobbyist astronomer Douglas Bullis presented to the Port Alfred monthly meeting of the U3A (University of the Third Age) a viewpoint expanding this search by posing the question, “Is the universe itself alive?”

The idea of a living universe is not a new one. More than 2,000 years ago, Plato said, “The universe is a single living creature that embraces all living creatures within it.”

But Plato was in no position to prove how that might be possible because he did not have modern-day scientific instruments like the largest optical telescope in the world, SALT at Sutherland, and radio astronomy arrays like SA’s own MeerKAT near Sutherland, not to mention the rest of the world, to gather the evidence the prove the point one way or the other.

Doug started his talk by showing us that the night sky as we see it is limited by the narrow band of radiation we can see with our eyes, from deep red to blue of the sky and beyond. What we see is only 1% of all the electromagnetic radiation that the stars and galaxies of the universe generate.

Doug took us on a spectacular tour of what the Milky Way looks like in gamma rays, the X-ray band, Infra-red, Microwaves and radio waves. It is startling how much light in the universe we do not see, and how different the universe is when seen in these different kinds of light. Each of these band of radiation tells us things about the sky we would never know without them.

Doug’s talk was enlivened by many videos of the universe in motion.

One took us space-ship style into the very centre of our galaxy, passing innumerable stars on the way.

Another showed the evolution of the entire universe as if it rotated like a giant ball in front of us, with its interior going through spectacular changes that Doug compared with our own growing up years, ending at about age 25.

The images were truly spectacular, and in Doug Bullis’s view, have many of the properties of living organisms, like metabolism, a circulatory system, and a system of electronic pathways like nerves in humans to communicate from one part of the universe to other.

It was a beautiful lecture, whether or not you think Doug’s argument was convincing.

You can see Doug Bullis’s unusual and exotically beautiful (to our eyes) views of more traditional planets, stars, and galaxies in Doug’s next U3A talk, “The Universe We Don’t See”.