The Cosmic Coincidence
Solar eclipses are a chilling phenomenon when you really think about what's happening at a scale that’s larger than your own life. For a total solar eclipse to happen the earth, the moon, and the sun have to line up in perfect proportion and perfect distance apart from each other at just the perfect moment in time and space.
Scientists call these kinds of things, Cosmic Coincidence. The moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun, the Sun is 400 times larger than the moon, so for the Moon to be able to block the Sun's rays completely by passing between the Earth and the Sun, it must be such a precise size, mass, and distance from the Earth, to create a total Solar Eclipse, if it were any further or closer by mear fractions of distance, this phenomenon would never exist. This remarkable size-to-distance ratio means that during a total solar eclipse, the Moon can completely cover the Sun's face. Hence, for lack of any other explanation, we came up with “The Cosmic Coincidence” to describe how perfect is all is when it happens.
Today, upon waking, I was recalling a dream that I was having about an ex who I had stopped talking to a few years ago. We'd been lovers since Spanish class, my senior year in college.
We had said our last goodbye in the Atlanta airport.
I was on the east coast for work and returning to Seattle through Atlanta. When the plane touched down, I received a message from him requesting to contact him. It was a total coincidence that he was also at the Atlanta airport at the exact same time.
He was stationed in Germany and I was living on the west coast of the United States, so neither of us belonged on the east coast, and the fact that our planes were crossing in Atlanta and that neither of us knew the other was going to be there, seemed too good to be true.
Mark was about to leave for his third, and hopefully, final tour of war in Iraq. He had been serving in the military since we graduated college and was now a Captain in the US Army. He was at the Atlanta airport awaiting his transport to Afghanistan but our planes would then be headed in opposite directions across the globe. He had survived each tour by saying his goodbyes before he left, and then going silent until he returned.
There was a possibility we'd overlap in the airport, and if he could make it happen, he wanted to see me before he left for war. When I walked off the tarmac, wheeling my travel sized suitcase, and up the ramp and into the building, he wasn't there. I looked for a long time, my eyes searching the crowd.
I thought to myself, "I guess it wasn't meant to be" and began to walk toward my next gate on the way home to Seattle.
And then, he was there, walking down the corridor in his desert camouflage and carrying his rucksack.
I watched him approach, unchanged, still strikingly good looking, perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect uniform, all 195cm of him, a vision of patriotic perfection. I loved him.
I went through all of the motions in my head; I ran up to him, dropped everything I was carrying to the ground, jumped into his arms, and wrapped my legs around his waist, showering his face with kisses; just like you see on television when the soldiers come home.
But he wasn't coming home, he was on his way to war; and the two of us, we didn't have emotional exchanges like that.
Instead we greeted each other. We walked together.
I went with him as far as I could go as a civilian to his military transport and there we sat down and ordered sushi. He couldn't drink a beer, but wanted me to have one, so it would remind him of being normal. We made small talk.
He said "I wish I could take you from here and go out with you in Atlanta like we did that one time in St Louis." I remembered, I had worn a green silk dress and gold heels to dinner, and he drank expensive scotch in his perfectly tailored jacket and fancy watch.
That time when we had met in St Louis, was the first time we had seen each other in twelve years after college, and it was like no time had passed, and neither of us had changed, much. I was more jaded. I had my heartbroken a few more times. He was more stoic, he had been to Iraq a few times. We fucked like crazy, with the curtains flung wide open against the floor to ceiling glass panes in the hotel room. The St. Louis skyline sparkled below us, and the Gateway Arch bent before our eyes. We had gone to see a Cardinal’s baseball game with good seats, and took a ride to the observation deck of the Arch, smiling for a picture, me standing on my tiptoes with my arms squeezing his massive chest, his arm wrapped around my waist, large hand clutching the soft spot between my ribs and hips, like teenagers in love.
This time, in the Atlanta airport, as he got up to leave and paid for my sushi, I stood up from the table as tall as I could make myself, and I actually threw my arms around him and hugged him as tightly as I could, wanting him to understand that I meant it with everything I had.
"I love you," I said and I think I had the courage to look him in the eye when I said it.
His head hung a little low as he replied, "I don't want to go. Thank you for that. I think I needed that" and he left.
A few days later, I wrote him; that I loved him, that I'd wait for him, and that I'd move to be with him wherever he was when he returned from Afghanistan.
He wrote back with consideration, kindness, and clarity; that I wasn't the one for him. I stayed connected with him all through the time in Afghanistan to make sure I knew that he returned safely, and then I cut all ties with Mark.
I did this for me, because I was the one still holding on, I was the one who had hoped the coincidences of our meetings throughout the years, had meant that the stars were aligned in our individual houses of love and commitment. But he had been clear in his response. I wasn’t the one for him and this was no total eclipse, only the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun crossing each other in orbit, at that imperfect distance.
So today, I woke to a dream about Mark. He looked different than I remembered him, skinnier, but it was undeniably him. I gave him a hug and didn’t let go for a few lasting moments, so he understood that I meant it, with everything I had.
The Cosmic Coincidence is that the Sun and the Moon appear to be the same size in the sky and their crossing paths occasionally creates a total solar eclipse. If the Moon were a different mass or size or it was a different distance from the Earth, it would have a different tidal effect on the Earth, and it wouldn't cause total eclipses. In fact, they suppose that if anything about the size of the Moon or the distance of the Moon from the Earth, would be different, it would have created a completely different tidal pull and we wouldn’t have evolved to stand upright and walk on two legs.
All these things we take for granted, being fundamental to life on Earth as we know it, and yet the only scientific explanation of the Sun and the Moon and the Earth aligning to create a total eclipse and the Moon being just the perfect size, distance, and mass to appear to be the same size in the sky as the 400 times larger Sun, is that it is a Cosmic Coincidence.
I stopped believing in coincidences years ago.
After waking up to the dream about Mark today, I looked him up on social media. He had gotten married over the weekend.
Another alignment of stars and planets like this will not happen again until the year 2032.
I will see you there.
“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust.
You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life – weren’t created at the beginning of time.
They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode.
So, forget Jesus.
The stars died so that you could be here today.”
— Lawrence M. Krauss
Dynamical, biological, and anthropic consequences of equal lunar and solar angular radii
Steven A. Balbus (Oxford University)
(Submitted on 2 Jun 2014)
The nearly equal lunar and solar angular sizes as subtended at the Earth is generally regarded as a coincidence. This is, however, an incidental consequence of the tidal forces from these bodies being comparable. Comparable magnitudes implies strong temporal modulation, as the forcing frequencies are nearly but not precisely equal. We suggest that on the basis of paleogeographic reconstructions, in the Devonian period, when the first tetrapods appeared on land, a large tidal range would accompany these modulated tides. This would have been conducive to the formation of a network of isolated tidal pools, lending support to A.S. Romer's classic idea that the evaporation of shallow pools was an evolutionary impetus for the development of chiridian limbs in aquatic tetrapodomorphs. Romer saw this as the reason for the existence of limbs, but strong selection pressure for terrestrial navigation would have been present even if the limbs were aquatic in origin. Since even a modest difference in the Moon's angular size relative to the Sun's would lead to a qualitatively different tidal modulation, the fact that we live on a planet with a Sun and Moon of close apparent size is not entirely coincidental: it may have an anthropic basis. arXiv:1406.0323v1 [astro-ph.EP]
