Escaping the Prison of the Solar System: How Stars and Planetary Systems Are Born?
Today, I’d like to start with a quote from an architect whose words deeply impressed me. He said,
“Without symbols and signs, there would be no space in the universe. Perhaps the universe has never existed at all.”
What does this cryptic sentence mean? In fact, we have always imagined the universe in many different ways and drawn pictures of it. But can we really say that the universe in our minds and hearts truly represents the ‘real universe’?
The Fake Solar System We Know
Let me make a short request to you: take exactly 5 seconds now to picture the solar system. Try to visualize what the solar system looks like in your mind.
I think most of you would have imagined the typical image of the solar system that we easily find when we Google it. It’s very common, with a large sun at the center and planets orbiting around it on white orbital lines, resembling pretty skewers in a tanghulu.
However, this familiar image of the solar system is actually a ‘fake picture’ based on our distorted memories and experiences. In fact, if we look closely, the sizes of celestial bodies in such pictures do not reflect actual proportions at all.
Moreover, the scale of planetary orbits from the sun also does not accurately represent reality. The solar system itself is an incredibly vast world. If we were to draw a precise representation of every celestial body and its size and distance on a single sheet of paper, it would be almost impossible due to how empty and vast this world really is.
Thus, even what we think we know well about the solar system can be remembered in a very different way from reality. That’s why the architect made that statement: “The universe we have long believed we knew so well is actually just one picture reflecting our symbols and signs, not the actual universe.”
The Prison of Paradigms
Starting today with this journey through the solar system, I want to help you escape this ‘prison’ of paradigms. More objectively, more roughly speaking, it’s about seeing our home solar system from a different perspective, one that is less human-centric.
I once had an interesting conversation with a professor where he explained that we often refer to the worldview or cosmology of an era as a ‘paradigm.’ But if you step back and think about it differently:
A paradigm is actually “a kind of lie that has gone undiscovered for hundreds of years, which everyone believes.” Ultimately, after more time passes, I believe our current understanding and paradigm of the universe and this solar system will change significantly.
In this sense, starting today, let’s consider these paradigms as a ‘prison of perception’ that we may not be able to escape yet but one day humanity must break through to move forward.
Seeing the Universe Through ‘Planetary Systems,’ Not Just ‘Solar Systems’
As we know, the solar system is a small world with eight large celestial bodies orbiting around the sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. We live on the third planet from the sun, the beautiful planet called Earth.
Until just 20 years ago, humans believed that only our sun had planets orbiting it. But in fact, this was not true at all. In just the past two decades, we’ve discovered that many other stars also have their own worlds around them. The number of exoplanet candidates already discovered or inferred has easily surpassed ten thousand.
With this knowledge of exoplanets, we no longer need to view our solar system as a special ‘one-of-a-kind.’ In reality, the solar system is just one among countless star systems and planetary systems that fill up the universe.
So starting today, I would like you to temporarily erase the keyword ‘solar system’ from your mind and instead look at the universe with the more universal term ‘planetary system.’
The Birth Process of Stars in the Universe
How are stars and planetary systems like our solar system formed? Astronomers now have a fairly clear understanding of this process.
When we observe space, we see large clouds of gas and dust with high density. We call these molecular clouds, or ‘molecular clouds.’
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