Alan Duff: Subscriber's guide to the universe

Telescopes such as the Hubble allow us to visit the stars in our imagination. Photo / Nasa

Magazine has been informing armchair scientists since my ancestors were learning to live together in NZ.

A year ago I started subscribing to Scientific American, a publication my older brother has read for years. Our father got us interested as children in both science and gaining knowledge for its own sake. Now it is essential reading, first for the wondrous insights, but also the clarity of language. Some of the sentences are, at least to a writer, wonderfully succinct.

Here is an example: "Instead of a featureless mass of cafe-au-lait-coloured clones, we are already starting to see a glorious riot of variations - dark-skinned, freckled blondes and striking combinations of green eyes and olive skin." (September 2014 issue.)

Not too many years before Scientific American began in 1845, my Maori ancestors were cannibals and they kept slaves. In the Western world, even back in those times, eating human flesh was considered abominable behaviour and the mark of an uncivilised people.

Not so slavery. My ancestors considered it not only normal but expected of a tribe to eat the cooked flesh of the slain enemy tribe. Truth is, while Maori slaves were often meat on the foot, black slaves in Western countries were hearing the drums of emancipation beating. But Maori ceased the practice of keeing slaves before they did in the West, if compelled under newly imposed British law.

As a late convert to rare meat and with too vivid an imagination, I would not have made a very credible cannibal. And I hate even a hotel aide carrying my suitcase, let alone want slaves. It's tribalism that bothers. Successful societies, in my humble opinion, come only out of tribes uniting, so they become more than the sum of their parts.

The magazine enlightens readers on everything. From Evolution to the Big Bang, to the workings of the human body down to molecular level, scientists make all sorts of remarkable discoveries. We know the mating rituals of creatures from bed mites to whales, more light is shed on animal and plant life. On and beautifully on. And, if you love numbers like I do (because each contains a story and often a history) there are always ample statistics and math graphs in this marvellous magazine to explain what words cannot.

Facts and figures to do with our own Milky Way, for example.

Light travels roughly 10 trillion kilometres in a year. The Milky Way is 100,000 to 200,000 light years across. That's one million trillion kilometres. With at least 200 billion galaxies out there, each with several hundred billion stars and planets, stretched now to an estimated 90 billion light years across. Humans will never travel even to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, 4.37 light years away.

But our eyes - through increasingly ingenious instruments, and our clever brains - already go to the very outermost of the universe as it was about 13.5 billion years ago.

Those faint images, even to the "eyes" of the Hubble Telescope, will be revealed one day in greater clarity and not just smudges of faintest light. That's how we'll get to travel the universe: with our eyes.

But only the universe's past. Never the present. An article in a previous Scientific American spoke of a universe one day fading from view as it keeps expanding. So one day humans will look up at a starless sky. That would be my version of Hell, the idea of being quite alone and left behind forever.

How many know - I quote from a September 2014 issue of said magazine - "the human nose's bitter receptors react to chemicals that bacteria use to communicate"? How on earth do scientists find out these things? The world would be lost without their abiding sense of curiosity, their desire to know.

My paternal great-grandfather was born in Bagshot, Surrey, England in 1830. While he was becoming a rare, literate kid in his village, my Maori ancestors were feasting on enemy flesh. My paternal great-grandmother, an immigrant from Scotland, arrived in Dunedin on October 8, 1861, bonded to the Rev Will. She was a fundamentalist Protestant with a strong dislike of alcohol. In 26 years, every two years she produced a child to a total of 13, one of whom was Oliver, my grandfather, who became the founding editor of the New Zealand Listener.

William and Margaret Duff farmed in south Otago. Oliver had a lifelong love affair with farming, he admired farmers' work ethic and their honesty and, in retirement, wrote a column for the Listener called Shepherd's Calendar, set around his 20ha farmlet. I wonder what Scientific American would say of this grandson's love of farming and the fact that I became a writer?