Philip Ball: belief

Transcript context

…I think so. Yes. He took Shatner up there, Shatner, of course, being Captain Kirk of Star Trek. Shatner came back and said he felt this profound emptiness, really, loneliness, terrifying loneliness. He felt that he was looking at death when he looked out into space, which is absolutely not what you expect to hear from Captain Kirk. I think that’s right, the right way to see it. Space, in reality — when we’re out there, when people are out there, it’s constantly trying to kill us in all sorts of ways. With radiation, obviously; it’s incredibly cold; it’s a vacuum. So, it’s a deathly place. I think that the space looks beautiful to us from Earth, from this place of safety. It’s because it’s a place of safety that actually, I think space reminds us of how precious — or should remind us of how precious this place is, this place where we have the privilege of being able to look out onto the stars from somewhere that gives us everything we need. From that perspective, it is awe inspiring. I guess, when I look out on a night like that, when I’m away from London, away from the light pollution, that what I feel is awe in the old sense, in the 19th-century sense of the sublime, this slightly terrified awe of what is out there, of our — I wouldn’t say our insignificance, but our small part in something that is just so vast. When you really think about what all these pinpricks of light represent, certainly, if you look through a telescope, some of them being entire galaxies, and we have no idea. We really have no idea how far that goes out to. There’s a beauty to it, but it’s a terrifying beauty. Speaking of terrifying, what’s the hidden, or you could say Straussian, reading of the Chartres Cathedral in France?…

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