I didn't think I would cry. I just wanted to watch something that wouldn't make my grief worse (a loved one just passed away). Netflix's documentary, Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, wasn’t supposed to make me weep, but I wept anyway.
The documentary follows physicists, mathematicians, and computer engineers from all over the world who worked together to do the impossible. Their mission was to capture a picture of a black hole using the Event Horizon Telescope, which is a network of telescopes around the world. The whole mission weaves between theoretical physics and emotional strength. It shows the viewers how years of working together, going through setbacks, and impossible calculations all came together to form one haunting picture. The documentary shows us their struggles with equations and weather delays and later their joys when they realized they had finally achieved their mission.
Towards the end of the documentary, I lost it as soon as they showed the first image of the M87 supermassive black hole. It was an image of a dark center with a faint, perfect ring of light around it. Such an event had never happened before in human history. We used to think we could never capture it. And there it was. It was no longer just theory or math but something we could finally see and prove. We could finally see the unseeable.
It wasn't the mind-blowing science that got to me. It was the time it took for that image to travel to our planet. That image of light we saw in 2019 had been traveling for 55 million years from the galaxy M87. We somehow caught that image of the black hole in this present day during our lifetime. What we were really looking at wasn't just a region in space. We were looking back in time.
Fifty-five million years ago, the Earth was in the early Eocene epoch, which was only ten million years after the dinosaurs vanished. The world was warm and tropical and teeming with early mammals. Forests covered much of the land. Our distant ancestors were small, curious primates who climbed trees and lived on a planet that was still recovering from extinction.
The light began its journey somewhere in that ancient, lush world. It left behind a galaxy that no living thing on Earth had ever thought of. It traveled through the universe steadily as life on Earth evolved. It kept going as continents shifted, species came and went, and the first humans learned to make fire, create religions, build temples, write poetry, and wage wars. It travelled throughout millions of millennia and arrived in our lifetimes.
That's why I cried. So poetic. It felt like divine timing, a cosmic coincidence that was too beautiful to ignore. Our existence coincided with this fleeting moment in history, marking the completion of that ancient light's journey. That all of human history had aligned so that we could see the shadow of something that used to only exist in the realms of physics and imagination. A black hole is a void so complete that it bends reality, and the light that falls into it makes it visible to our eyes.
I felt small and humbled. I reflected on the countless generations that had lived and died without ever being aware of this. In the grand scheme of things, our stories are extremely small. But somehow, we were able to look back 55 million years and make sense of what we saw. We were able to see it because we had the courage to ask questions and persistently search for answers.
I think that's what stayed with me after I finished watching it. It's a reminder that certain things we perceive as unknowable may not remain so. Sometimes, truth comes like light from far away, slowly and without fail. And sometimes, the edge of everything we know is just the beginning of the realm of future discoveries.
I wonder how many more truths are coming our way right now? The proof of the existence of aliens? If we keep looking, I wonder what other things that seem impossible we might discover.
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