Feeling Small in the Vastness

Until we were in our teenage years, my older brother and I shared a bedroom. One night, when I was seven, we lay awake, talking about the enormity of space. I tried to contemplate a galaxy with billions of stars and a universe that expanded forever, perhaps. I remember the fear those thoughts gave me; that I couldn’t comprehend the enormity of space, and that I couldn’t answer the question: if the universe doesn’t go on forever, what’s on the other side?¹

At one time or another, all of us have had the opportunity to view a night sky without all of our modern light “pollution”. The stars visible to the naked eye are breathtaking, and what we can see is an incredibly tiny percentage of all that is out there.

The universe is big. Really big. There are so many things (a scientific term describing everything bigger than Le Bus floating in space) that the significance of the number is lost on us. We can’t really comprehend the numbers in 10¹² or 10¹⁵.

And here we are on our relatively small, blue marble, cruising around our relatively small sun at 67,000 miles per hour.

For hundreds (maybe thousands) of years, humanity believed we were alone in the cosmos (how very presumptuous of us). Every person alive today could be allocated 1,000 square feet and we’d all fit in Texas, US. That’s the measure of our collective insignificance against the mass of the Earth which, again, is a pretty small planet by most estimates. The odds that we are alone in the universe are staggeringly low (1/10²¹ or smaller).

Werner Karl Heisenberg (that physicist behind the Heisenberg uncertainty principle) once stated:

Setting our thoughts of the universe aside for a moment, consider a time when you’ve felt small against the backdrop of some challenge you’re facing in life. Perhaps your partner has just abandoned you to raise your three children alone. Perhaps you’ve been diagnosed with a disease…

Related posts:

The secret to making money in cryptocurrency? Staying invested long-term, through good times. Here’s how to do it. The key to making money in crypto is remaining in the crypto market. Your length of…

The 2020 Cardinals draft was one of the best we’ve seen in recent years. With some players soaring through the top 100 lists as they develop, and some just emerging as high-ceiling prospect…

Pensando no futuro. “Futuro” is published by Lu Vieira.