Needed: a Dante for the Hubble

At Science Musings, Chet Raymo meditates on the various "billions" that are needed to describe life and the universe. Science, he writes, "lays before us a stupendous story of creation—a gigamyth—sweeping in its grandeur, myriad in its dimensions, and we can only shake our heads in incomprehension." He concludes:

I have the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photograph as the desktop on my computer. The photo is the deepest view we have ever had into space. It shows a part of sky equal to the intersection of crossed straight pins held at arm's length. The shutter of the camera was open for a total of 11.3 days. Nearly 10,000 galaxies are visible in the photo. The most distant galaxy in the photograph is about 12 billion light-years away.

The Hubble photo is before me as I write, filling the margins of the screen around the edges of my word-processing document with hints of gigatude.

Each of the specks of light on the photograph is a galaxy of stars and planets. Within each speck there are a thousand billion universes such as the one that Dante traversed in the Divine Comedy. And the grandeur of that cosy little universe stretched Dante's powers of description.

Who will take us on an equal tour of the universe of the Hubble and teach us to feel at home? Carl Sagan gave his best shot but he was not Dante's equal. We await our first great gigapoet.