Cosmic Perspectives

“The universe’s history is a testament to the incredible journey that has led to our existence. We must take a deep breath and acknowledge everything that has happened to allow us to be here in this paradise. If we truly are an “intelligent civilization,” we need to slow down and reconsider our relationship with the environment, as well as our role in its preservation. Understanding and appreciating this timeline may help us develop a profound appreciation for the delicate balance that allows life to exist on Earth.”

- Pablo Budassi

For too long, I seem to have failed to realize that art can be as perceptually expansive as words can be; too often, I had relied on an exclusively linguistic approach of trying to expand perspective, but our visualization ability (‘aphantasia’) is something we have for a reason — a big reason — and something that can churn the imagination much more efficiently.

Pablo Budassi, artist, author and architect, has been creating visual representations of the kind that don’t seem to be exactly possible; they’re peppered throughout this piece.

Pablo painstakingly condenses the whole of our knowable universe into something visually digestible, cramming unfathomable scales of perspective into a digitalized frame of reference no bigger than a few squared inches.

As a caveat to the below article, a Q&A with Pablo about his creative process follows suit, offered to get a deeper insight into the inspirations that swirl about such a creatively daunting process.

In the words of Alberto Giacometti: “The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.”

Heliodynamism

Moving at half a million miles per our, our solar system is currently blasting through a cavity in an interstellar medium opened up by the prior explosions of supernovas. This cosmic valley is mysteriously conducive to life, offering of a relatively stable environment for us to ride the nebular embers of our unknown creation.

Led by our Sun, the heliosphere (a hot bubble of solar wind encircling us) marks the boundary where the Sun’s influence wanes and infinitude of space begins. Coasting through space, it’s both a massive windshield of light that pierces through an incomprehensible dark and a minuscule fleck in a fiery froth of cosmic plasma.

Our home system is located in the Orion arm of the Milky Way — 27,000 light-years from the galactic core. It takes something like 250 million years to complete one full orbit around its center — a ‘galactic year’.

The Milky Way itself is about 100,000 light-years in diameter, making it larger than most other spiral galaxies but smaller than some of the giant, multi-faceted elliptical star systems in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of stars and has a total mass about a trillion times that of our Sun, most of which is [currently] indecipherable, prompting us to cling a little too much on stop-gap labels of dark matter or dark energy.

Scattered throughout our stellar system are hundreds of millions of black holes, multiplying via our perceptive capacity.

Most notable of these is Sagittarius A, the big drain that anchors our Milky Way and simultaneously consumes it, creating our signature spiraled pattern.

There’s also the lifelessly named GRO J1655–40, a microquasar that flashes radioactive hints at us about the odd behaviours of black holes.

The first ever black hole that we’ve discovered, Cygnus X-1, is one that Stephen Hawking famously bet against in the 70’s. Hawking argued it to be a neuron star and, after intensive debate amongst the astrophysical community, he eventually found himself conceding to theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. Thorne’s work with films like Interstellar pushed our collective perception along by allowing us to better visualize the near imperceptible structure of a black hole — something we’ve only recently been able to idealize with relative accuracy.

Convergence

Our closest galactic neighbors are Triangulum and Andromeda, and we’re playing an unwinnable game of chicken with the latter. The collision is scheduled to occur in about 4.5 billion years, at which point we’ll morbidly and romantically entangle to birth a new galaxy — one much more complex and volatile than any that we seem to currently know.

The gravitationally-incalculable merger will result in a massive elliptical stellar system, with arms spiraling out like tentacles in more than just two directions; the two supermassive black holes at the center of each colliding galaxy will eventually combine in a single, even larger black hole at the core of ‘Milkomeda’.

If we were to hypothetically survive this, our night sky would be filled with a spread of stars so thick that it would almost be senseless to single out any particular constellation; orbits would be more randomized and the whole system would be a hotbed of unpredictable radioactivity.

Coalescing Cliques

But all of this would be a quiet swirl of dust across a vast and immeasurable desert; the Milky Way, Andromeda and Triangulum are just three citizens in what we call a Local Group of 50 total galaxies.

This Local Group — discovered by the ragtag team of aptly named pioneers Hubble, Shapley and Zwicky — spans about 10 million light-years across, with our own galaxy ranked second in size behind Andromeda, and well ahead of other galaxies like Barnard’s Galaxy, Draco and Fornax.

Between the Sheets

Zooming out from the Local Group, the next level of organization in the cosmic structure is the what we can only try to linguistically contextualize as the Galactic Local Sheet — part of the Virgo Supercluster.

Credited for its mapping are Fritz Zwicky (again) and Gerard de Vaucouleurs of the early-to-mid 20th Century, though it wasn’t until the 1970s that the Virgo Supercluster was more precisely refined by astronomers that specifically analyzed swaths of redshift data to map out a three-dimensional structure.

This Sheet is a flattened structure of galaxies that includes our Local Group, and its sheet-like arrangement of star systems is roughly 2 million light-years thick. It hosts other galactic cocktails like the Maffei Group and the Sculptor Group.

Faraway Frequencies

As we continue our ascent from tangible structures to intangible classifications, we next arrive at the Galactic Local Volume, encompassing all galaxies within approximately 35 million light-years of the Milky Way. It includes galactic groups and clusters like the M81 Group (which contains the spiral galaxy M81 and several dwarf galaxies) and the Centaurus Group — a group of galaxies including Centaurus A, a radio galaxy.

Unlike our relatively docile galaxies, radio galaxies have an active galactic nucleus (AGN) which shoots of a dramatically higher detectable output of energy, from which quasars and supermassive black holes (hundreds of millions of times the mass of our own black hole) are actively displacing surrounding matter.

Immense Heavens

As we continue through the realms of super clusters, we can also stop to comment on the Laniakea Supercluster, which spans over 520 million light-years and fittingly translates into “immense heaven”. It was identified through no small efforts by a team of researchers in 2014; led by astronomer R. Brent Tully, the group used a new method to map the local universe’s large-scale structures, analyzing the velocities of galaxies to determine their gravitational influences and the boundaries of notable superclusters.

Interview with Brent Tully Coming Soon | 09–2024

Tully’s team ultimately discovered that the Milky Way is part of a much larger supercluster than previously thought, encouraging the idea that superclusters can be defined by the flow of galaxies within them rather than just their static positions.

Cosmic Miscellaneity

Zooming out from superclusters, we reach even larger structures in the universe — walls, filaments, and other irregular parts of the cosmic web. This is where things start to get artistic.

The Great Walls are enormous structures that are formed by spans of superclusters and are among the largest known structures in the universe. Discovered in 2003, the Sloan Great Wall is over a billion light years in length; the South Pole Wall, discovered in 2020, extends over 1.37 billion light years and the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall is currently the most massive known structure in the observable universe — spanning over 10 billion light years across.

Synchronizing everything together into some kind of ordered mosaic is the over-arching concept of the cosmic web — a vast network of interconnected filaments, walls and voids — voids that span trillions of light years across and, as if simplifying things into a simple koan, create the potential for cosmic life to grow out of.

From here, we let go of the more measurable or observable part of reality and venture into the domain of theory. In so doing, we encounter concepts that push the boundaries of our understanding of cosmology and physics: string and multiverse theories, Starobinsky-, chaotic-, eternal- inflations, Ekpyrotic and cyclic models, holographic or bubble universes, higher dimensionalities.

For many, this is all more than we generally think of when we look up at a starry night. For some, it’s nowhere near enough.

Our perspectives expand alongside our understandings and our capabilities but, more than anything, they expand alongside our curiosity.

Until we have the technological prowess to get to the other side of the universe — where ever it may be — we’re left relying on our imagination to full in many of the blanks.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Below is a brief interview with Pablo Budassi, on his creative process.

On inspiration and methodology:

“As a graphic designer, I wondered if creating a more complex and realistic version of that simple graphic would be interesting and useful. I decided to give it a try…

…When conducting research on a subject, I pay close attention to the figures, charts, and maps in scientific papers that I come across. Many of them are designed specifically to highlight a trend or key aspect of the data, providing a knowable picture. In many cases, you can show what you want by tipping the scales in your favor. I sometimes spend more than half of my design time deciding on the proper scale to use. When communicating with visuals, perspective is essential, and scale is a significant component of perspective, if not the most important…

…There are no two identical planets or moons in our solar system, nor are there two identical star systems or galaxies in the universe… I use Wikipedia as a starting point to look up basic state of knowledge about a celestial body or a science subject. There is so much going on in astronomy these days that a graphic encompassing all of the universe’s scales can quickly become out of date…”

On creativity:

“My formal studies as an architect taught me not only how to balance function and aesthetics, but also how to potentially improve each of those aspects by allowing them to deviate from the obvious path and find the unexpected complement in each creative decision. Sometimes you can use your artistic license to make the visual more appealing to a larger audience, but I only allow myself to do so if the change opens a new possibility for communicating otherwise too technical or unknown information. Much astronomical knowledge remains uncertain and debatable”

On the potential for error:

“Making conscientious self-criticism, I believe that my biggest failure is presenting confirmed scientific facts at the same visual level as unconfirmed hypotheses and failing to provide all clarifications. Because my art style is hyperrealistic, many people may misinterpret the maps as an accurate scale view of the territory, and some may even think we are attempting to present these illustrations as real photos. On the other hand, these drawings are so all-encompassing that adding a note for each unconfirmed fact would transform the illustration into several pages of notes. I prefer to walk along the thin ledge of what has recently been discovered or theorized, and then update the refuted hypotheses when needed.”

On his famous ‘Time Spiral’:

“I am very curious as to why living beings exist. While ‘Time Spiral’ does not attempt to provide an answer to that big question, it does show everything that had to happen in order for us to be where we are, as well as the time scales for everything. A universe with a “start,” evolving stars that produce heavier elements, and two-thirds of a history without Earth. But the third brought everything at once: Earth, water, the Moon, and life. It seems remarkable to me that as soon as Earth cools, life is found on its surface. As if the seed of life was already present everywhere. The first noticeable thing that life did was to oxygenate the atmosphere, almost extinguishing itself in an oxygen catastrophe. But life persisted and remained quiet and microbial for three-quarters of Earth’s history, until a new level of complexity emerged beyond bacteria and plants. The last quarter of Earth’s history has seen an explosion in diversity after the completion of the ozone layer. During the final .2% of Earth’s history, various hominin races interacted and blended together. Finally, Homo sapiens invented machines, giving rise to the Anthropocene epoch, which is depicted as a black cloud that engulfed all of nature. You can do whatever you want with all that information. I believe we are here for more than just oxygenating the atmosphere and eventually becoming civilized, happy, comfortable, and extinct.”

On purpose:

“Nature may be fractal, or constructal, or random. Yes, in terms of size, the Universe is most likely infinite, or at least billions of times larger than the observable sphere. However, we will not be able to explore a single galaxy, not even in our wildest dreams. Speeds are simply too slow on large scales. On the other hand, our observational abilities may already be branching out in a fractal sense. No matter how deeply we look into the cosmos, there will always be more to discover. More photons, more neutrinos, more gravitational waves — and who knows what else! A quantum universe is also waiting to be fully deciphered. Humanity has enormous potential for getting arbitrary deep into essential questions.”