Your time is known

Over the course of many years, I've been pondering the classic Doctor Who episode "Full Circle" (first aired in late 1980). You may recall it as the episode that inroduces the Doctor's companion Adric. I'll summarize the essential plot points, but will have to reveal a spoiler or two in the following paragraphs. So the fourth Doctor and his companion Romana end up in a parallel universe and land on a planet called Alzarius inhabited by a group of humanoids who have been working for generations on a grounded spaceship. It seems that their ship, the Starliner, crashed long ago and they have been repairing it for return travel to their home planet Terradon. A phenomenon called mistfall begins to occur and two groups of creatures begin to emerge. First, venemous spiders hatch from the river fruit, and then marsh creatures, which walk upright and rather look like the creature from the black lagoon, rise out of the river. The humans retreat to the ship, and the marsh creatures begin to attack the ship.

There are a couple interesting reveals/plots twists (spoilers begin). First, the Doctor announces to the human's leaders that the ship isn't being repaired, but simply maintained and that it could actually depart the planet at any time. They respond that their problem is that none of the "system files" left by their ancestors has instructions for how to pilot the ship. The second and last reveal is that it turns out that the spiders, marsh creatures, and humanoids have "the same DNA", so they're actually three subspecies of the same species. And the colonists have never been to Terradon, but are native to Alzarius; the story about the grounded ship was a convenient myth perpetuated by the leadership.

The titular "full circle" is complete when marsh creatures start to overrun the ship. It turns out that what's been happening for 40,000 generations is that the marsh creatures have been attacking the ship at mistfall (every 50 years or so?), killing the humans, and evolving to replace them.¹ But this time, the Doctor manages to repel the creatures and the ship ascends to the stars.

The basic situation contains inconsistencies that beg for resolution. For example, how was the ship first built? But let's ignore such questions for now. I found the story off-putting at first because I thought it was impugning the Garden in Genesis as one of those convenient myths. I haven't been able to watch the full episde in decades, so I forget why I thought that. Maybe it was the invocation of "evolution" to undermine a story about the past. But the deeper part that's begun to resonate with me after all these decades is the way the mythical past (not mythical in the sense of false, but mythic in the sense of bigger than ordinary life) was really a vision for and of the future.

There is a sense in which our destiny is written from the beginning of our lives, a sense one has of what the arc of one's life is going to be like. In a lot of ways my life has turned out unexpectedly. But in other ways, I probably should have expected all this weirdness. What I really need is courage—courage bolstered by the knowledge that the future is not completely unknown, but is part of the created whole that is my life, my being, which, though divided by time, persists through time. As Guardini writes,

[In this unknown region of the future] everyone must make the venture in the confidence that the future is not a chaos or a totally strange thing. Rather, his own character, the ordering power within him, will make a way so that it is really his own future into which he moves.

This also forms the natural basis for the message of Christ about the Providence which guards every man—the messge that the future, although unknown, is not strange, not hostile, but is arranged for him by God; that existence, although it extends far beyond our ken, is not a chaos, but ordered by God for him.

To believe this and live accordingly may be difficult for a person who is of a hesitant or timid disposition. But here the courage to live coincides with trust in the divine guidance.

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Notes

1. Technological progress and apocalyptic recurrence is vaguely reminiscent of A Canticle for Leibowitz.

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Romano Guardini, Learning the Virtues that Lead You to God (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1992), 102.

Absolute Time and Space

Currently we are being treated to a remake of Carl Sagan's classic series Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. (Interesting that with it's agnostic/atheist slant, it's on the Fox Network.) The latest installment explains Einstein's relativity. It's a good explanation insofar as it goes, but then we're informed that time and space are completely relative.

That's the usual scientific line, and there's something to it, but from a broader, fully human perspective, it's garbage.

Just from the point of view of established science, it's wrong. In fact Dr. Tyson's own narrative takes for granted that time is not relative: if time were completely relative, it would make no sense to quote an age of the universe. Or distances for that matter. Or even a speed for our galaxy or local group of galaxies.

The age of the universe is measured from the instant of the "Bang" (a misnomer since it wasn't an explosion in the conventional sense of a pressure wave expanding into anything). The absolute standard of rest is the frame in which the cosmic microwave background radiation is isotropic (not red- or blue-shifted in any direction). The proper velocity of our galaxy is relative to this frame of rest. These absolute measures are relative to the beginning of the universe, the creation.

Certainly in isolation the locomotion of matter has no absolute frame of reference, because there is nothing outside it. In concentrating on matter in isolation, physics as a methodological assumption neglects the absolute boundary or beginning: the horizon is the experimenter or observer.

The fundamental shortcoming of science that we always forget is that it flattens the universe beneath human power and takes matter out of its context, which is form—form imposed not only by human agency, but also given by nature and nature's God.