User:Neutronium/Cosmos



This is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Take a moment, now. It's easy in the routine of our daily lives to simply not think about the scale and objects I'm about to relate to you. What is big, to you? When I say grand, or vast, your mind probably flashes to a picture of the ocean, or to some great wall or skyscraper. Maybe you think of a mountain, like Everest. But what does it mean to be big? To understand this, we must first understand what it is to be small. Go outside at night. Take a piece of paper and look at it against the night sky. If you were to hold the piece of paper one meter away (a bit less than your height) from your eyes, and stare at a piece about 1/5 the length of a red ant, you'd see the area of the sky that this picture was taken of. The Hubble telescope stared at an area that small for eleven days, and captured this. Each of those dots of light in the sky is a galaxy (If you get the super-hi-res version at Wikipedia you can count them. NASA says there's over 10,000 there), a truly immense collection of stars and dust. Many of those stars have planets like ours orbiting around them. How many stars do you think are in each galaxy? If you guessed less than ten million, you're surely wrong. The smallest of the small galaxies hold an average of ten million stars, while the largest can hold as much as one trillion stars.

To get an idea of what this really means, consider the time you've spent just near one star. Your entire life was spent on one star in an average galaxy. That's a matter of some decades. If you were to just spend a minute at each of the stars in one of the smallest galaxies, never mind all the travel time that would add centuries to the expedition, you'd spend about 20 years. And in the bigger galaxies, near a trillion stars, that would be about 2,000 years, no travel time involved. Each of those little pinpricks of light in that picture is a truly, epicly, vast unexplorable space. You could spend your entire life on one of those little pinpricks, never knowing more than a tiny fraction of it. And let's not forget where this picture was taken either. This is a picture you get when you stare for eleven days on an area of the sky smaller than your smallest fingernail. This is the amount of matter in nothing at all. It is estimated that there are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe.

This feeling is what it feels like to be small. This is the feeling so unknown and shunned by Humans. In all our history we claim to have privilege. We strut around, so sure of ourselves, so sure that the Universe revolves around us. We erect religions espousing that the Creator of this vast Cosmos cares about us. The existence of this Creator is irrelevant to my argument. But Humans always like to believe that they understand what the Universe is and why it is here, and that they can talk to the Creator of this unimaginably large space. The sheer size of the Universe refutes all the notions of self-importance the Human race has ever considered. All of our confidence, our sense of entitlement, our feeling of superiority, vanishes in the face of the realization that all of our accomplishments and our pride is nothing in the face of the larger place we live in. The Galaxies do not sing of our achievements, nor do they answer our prayers. They are there, and they would not be any better or worse off if we didn't exist. To our own galaxy, we are not even a mote of dust. The confident ideologies and the political campaigns that occupy our time and our minds from day after day are virtually nonexistent to the Milky Way.

This is not an attack on any philosophical, political, or religious position. It is the fact of existence we elude so often in pursuit of the routine. We aren't even small. We are nothing.