I was inspired to write something today by this extremely long and painstakingly accurate chart of the Solar System that was drawn to scale by considering the moon to be the size of a pixel. The bottom of the screen is lined with a measuring scale that spans through the entire length of the page. I spent an hour appreciating this chart because it just blew my mind. I was struck with how much black, empty, nothingness exists out there! I had to find an object with the right weight and shape to place over the right-arrow key because there was so much scrolling to do. And as my eyes scrolled through all that black nothingness, a couple hundred thousand kilometres of it per second, my brain began to marvel at it all. Every now and then, I'd come across some thought provoking text, generously dropped in by the developers, and I realized how mind bogglingly massive the universe we live in is. The more I stared at the swiftly scrolling black screen the more I noticed about my surroundings, like how the tinier lines on the measuring scale seemed to move to the right while the longer ones moved left, and how the seven digit number hovering above them continued to ascend with different digits ascending at different paces. I became increasingly aware of my own reflection on that black screen and realized how tiny and insignificant I felt in the grand scheme of things. I learnt that
This is exactly what I could not, and still cannot, wrap my head around. If this is true, everything we do know about the known universe makes up a very very very tiny fraction of it.
Think about it;
Everything -
this world we live in,
everything you have possibly learnt from school,
everything you haven't,
all the people in your life,
all the songs you've known,
every photograph you've smiled for,
all the family vacations you hold dear,
all the tears you've shed
and memories you've put to bed,
every human structure that has stood still and fallen,
every story ever told,
every blade of grass and clinked beer glass,
every ball kicked off the ground,
every spaceship heavenward bound,
each tiny speck of debris floating in space,
each of the trillion stars sending us light from its place
from the tiniest amoeba pushing its way about in questionable waters
to oldest blue whale that swished its tail
somewhere in our Earthly waters;
every living, breathing organism that is alive today,
that was alive in the past
and that will live to see the future,
everything
makes up a measly 0.0000000000000000000042% of the known universe.
My attempt to understand this only made my brain want to blow up.
[To put things into a little more perspective, I also learnt that atoms too are mostly space. For example, if the singular proton of a hydrogen atom were the size of the sun, the electron would be at a distance 11 times that of this chart! And mind you, the chart itself is so huge, it would take you more than a thousand computers screens lined up side by side to view the whole thing. This made me feel like I was made of billions of tiny vacuum bubbles.]
It made me, in a sense, come to terms with my mortality and the improbableness of my existence. It made me think about a lot of things. It made me cry because there was so much to think about. That chart only made my acutely aware of how large our solar system is, but the universe?
I CAN'T HANDLE ALL THIS INFINITY! HOLY COW, ARE WE TINY! WHAT IS AIR!
*can't stop jumping up and down in my seat*
Pardon my hysterics, I'm known to be a little hyper.
Really though, we're just fragile sacks of flesh, bones and blood walking on this tiny blue rock that happened to be the right distance from our Sun, and happened to harbour life as complex and delicate as ours a couple million years ago, and happened to mercifully allow us miserable beings to squirm about its muddy surface.
Here we are, standing together on the tiny blue speck we call home, here to share it with all these beautiful creatures and to live our tiny lives which, to the Universe is but the blink of an eye.
Jane Doe and I were discussing this during a sleepover and we like calling this phenomenon 'The Big Picture.' It gave us strength knowing that the problems in our lives that seemed so huge to us at the time, were really nothing compared to the vastness of the cosmos. Just thinking about it made all our worries shrink. Nothing became more important than knowing that we were alive, and we were breathing, and that that in itself was a miracle.
I'll leave you with a song and this video that really made me think along the same lines.
Thanks just for reading!
Emptiness is actually everywhere. It’s something like 99.9999999999999999999958% of the known universe.
This is exactly what I could not, and still cannot, wrap my head around. If this is true, everything we do know about the known universe makes up a very very very tiny fraction of it.
Think about it;
Everything -
this world we live in,
everything you have possibly learnt from school,
everything you haven't,
all the people in your life,
all the songs you've known,
every photograph you've smiled for,
all the family vacations you hold dear,
all the tears you've shed
and memories you've put to bed,
every human structure that has stood still and fallen,
every story ever told,
every blade of grass and clinked beer glass,
every ball kicked off the ground,
every spaceship heavenward bound,
each tiny speck of debris floating in space,
each of the trillion stars sending us light from its place
from the tiniest amoeba pushing its way about in questionable waters
to oldest blue whale that swished its tail
somewhere in our Earthly waters;
every living, breathing organism that is alive today,
that was alive in the past
and that will live to see the future,
everything
makes up a measly 0.0000000000000000000042% of the known universe.
My attempt to understand this only made my brain want to blow up.
[To put things into a little more perspective, I also learnt that atoms too are mostly space. For example, if the singular proton of a hydrogen atom were the size of the sun, the electron would be at a distance 11 times that of this chart! And mind you, the chart itself is so huge, it would take you more than a thousand computers screens lined up side by side to view the whole thing. This made me feel like I was made of billions of tiny vacuum bubbles.]
It made me, in a sense, come to terms with my mortality and the improbableness of my existence. It made me think about a lot of things. It made me cry because there was so much to think about. That chart only made my acutely aware of how large our solar system is, but the universe?
I CAN'T HANDLE ALL THIS INFINITY! HOLY COW, ARE WE TINY! WHAT IS AIR!
*can't stop jumping up and down in my seat*
Pardon my hysterics, I'm known to be a little hyper.
Really though, we're just fragile sacks of flesh, bones and blood walking on this tiny blue rock that happened to be the right distance from our Sun, and happened to harbour life as complex and delicate as ours a couple million years ago, and happened to mercifully allow us miserable beings to squirm about its muddy surface.
Here we are, standing together on the tiny blue speck we call home, here to share it with all these beautiful creatures and to live our tiny lives which, to the Universe is but the blink of an eye.
Jane Doe and I were discussing this during a sleepover and we like calling this phenomenon 'The Big Picture.' It gave us strength knowing that the problems in our lives that seemed so huge to us at the time, were really nothing compared to the vastness of the cosmos. Just thinking about it made all our worries shrink. Nothing became more important than knowing that we were alive, and we were breathing, and that that in itself was a miracle.
I'll leave you with a song and this video that really made me think along the same lines.
Thanks just for reading!
