Sunday, August 8, 2010

Before My Mind Escaped...

I was thinking the other day...then I thought “ah why bother?” and stopped. Unfortunately, the damage was done, and my mind had already taken off on a journey. Although I'm sort of enjoying the freedom, I'll be relieved when it checks back in.
Anyway, before my reckless mind took off on it's own, I managed to make some use of it. Here's what I squeezed out of it:
We are on Earth (although some people don't seem to have originated here). After we look at Earth, we start to look at the space around us. We live on a tiny speck in a massive solar system. But then we look at the space around our solar system, and realize...it's a speck in our galaxy. The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. It's 4.22 lightyears away from us. One lightyear is 6 trillion miles. You do the math. I can't my mind is still on holiday. Our galaxy has anywhere from 200 to 400 billion stars in it. If the closest one to us is 4.22 lightyears away...I can't even think about how far the farthest is. But then I look farther out of our galaxy...
The Milky Way is in a group of galaxies. There's twelve of them. The closest to us is Andromeda Galaxy. It is 2.5 million lightyears away from us. That hardly even makes sense. And then we keep pulling farther out... The twelve galaxies that surround us are puny when we keep looking. Farther outside our group of twelve galaxies is another cluster of galaxies. Our twelve puny galaxies seem like the most ridiculous massive amount of distances and open spaces possible. But this other cluster has six thousand galaxies. Not planets, or stars, galaxies. And that's not even a big cluster in the grand scheme of things. Six thousand galaxies isn't even a drop in a a puddle. Are you ready for this? There is estimated to be over 125 billion galaxies in our universe. What's interesting is we still have no idea if space ends or not, so that's assuming there's actually a finite number of them.
So what am I trying to say? To anyone that actually managed to stay awake through all that: I'm small. No wait...I'm so small that when my mind decides it's time to come home, I won't be surprised if it ends up in Somalia somewhere, because that's really less than an atom's distance away from me in the big picture.
But what really gets to me about all this is that we humans think we can figure it all out. We think we have all the answers to the universe's questions, or we will soon. What I've been led to believe by all this is that the only thing the universe is too small to hold is the human ego.

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