Thinking Big, Feeling Small

Or more correctly, trying to think big. Just check out the hundreds of stunning images at the Astronomy Photo of the Day (APOD): ; this is my point of departure.

How can anyone with the most basic sense of logic and common sense view these images and not come away with a feeling of awe and wonder? They are visually spectacular, just fantastic images, the colors and structure and flow and even hints at fractals making them art even. But then think for just a few seconds about what we're seeing. For example, take a look at the Snake Nebula (). Read the little note and see that we're looking at an image that's "a few" light years across. Okay, we'll take "a few" to mean a conservative "3." That's only 17,635,499,437,497 miles wide (note that this figure is working in the realm of trillions). By comparison, our moon is about 238,855 miles away and our sun is about 93 million miles away.

And the nebula itself is only "about 650" light years away. Okay, that's 3,821,024,878,124,350 miles on out there (this figure is operating in the quadrillion range). Remember, this a distance at which it has taken light about 650 years just to reach us (light coming from the sun takes just a few minutes).

Just for a bit more perspective, jumping way back down to working with 'just' billions: A billion seconds ago it was 1959. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate Washington spends it (the bastards). (Thanks to my bruddahs at Punahou, for this )

This is just a tiny exploration of the cosmic, bascially unimaginable scale on which the universe, that is REALITY takes place. Just the APOD photos of the Earth from orbit, let alone the moon are enough to make me feel small and insignificant. But for others with a bigger mind and ego and sense of self-worth, the photos of distant galaxies and other extragalactic structures ought to be enough to clue you in to your relative size and importance and significance. I meaan, there are photos of entire galaxies colliding and tearing apart, of multi-light year distances of matter and space being devoured by massive black holes and other voracious cosmic bodies that we simply don't understand. Hell, there's one at the center of our own galaxy, driving its spin, making its light, making the whole thing essentially work.

So how does this play into beliefs in religion? How does one reconcile Christian belief in Genesis and the origin of all reality when it's proven conclusively that light we are witnessing from the farthest regions of observable space originates from tens of billions of years ago? How does that jibe with Adam and Eve 6000-odd years ago?

Without rambling on and on, all these photos do is show how unbelievably small and truly insignificant we as humans are. It shows us how small and meaningless our planet is in an observable universe of countless galaxies containing countless trillions of stars, any number of which might contain a dozen or a few thousand or another billion planets full of critters or people or intelligent beings who love and cherish their children just as much as we do.

Just a few million miles out there, in the cosmic neighborhood are asteroids and chunks of rock and ice and space rubble that might just smash this planet into a lifeless husk. There is ample evidence of that, on this planet and on all other observable bodies. Life in the universe is extremely fragile, and just looking at a few of these photos is enough to place that thought into your mind, and keep it there.

So, what then must we do? Well, live your life and think about the transience of it all. The sun won't burn out tomorrow, but for all we know about our solar system, it could all go haywire next week or next year or 100 years from now. A previously unobserved asteroid could emerge from deep space and in just a few months or weeks slam into us and kill every single one of us, likely thereby rendering this blog largely unreadable. Life in the universe is short and capricious and vicious and random. Nobody is exempt and no one gets out alive. Keep that in mind, and live a little bit like you're thinking about that.