i was looking at apod (astronomy pic of the day, the nasa site for nerds like me) and i came across this picture of a cluster of galaxies. in terms of the scale/size of the universe this picture represents an almost infinitesimally small region. tiny to the nth degree. but yet in this photograph there are a few hundred galaxies, each with a few hundred billion stars. so, in this picture we’re essentially looking at a trillion stars, or possibly even more. and the distances represented within even one galaxy are incomprehensible, let alone the distances between one galaxy and another. but we’re looking at distances between hundreds of galaxies. the size of this picture is, roughly, 8,000,000 light years across. and the galaxies represented here are, roughly, 6,000,000,000 light years from us here on earth. to put it in perspective, the edge of our solar system is: 0.0005 of a light year from earth. so, the edge of our solar system is 5/10,000ths of a light year away. not even a 1/10th of a light year. not even 1/100th of a light year. not even a 1/1,000th of a light year. a tiny, tiny 1/10,000th of a light year. and even that’s a huge distance, a distance that would take decades for a conventional space ship to cover. and yet we’re looking here at an image that is 6 billion light years away, and that covers a distance of 3 million light years. and we’re looking at an image that represents a tiny, tiny, tiny part of our universe.
my point? well, it’s a point that’s been made by tons of people way smarter than i, and that is that the size of the universe is truly unimaginable. even the size of a single one of the galaxies pictured below is unimaginable to us. the size of our own milky way is unimaginable to us, and yet the milky way would fit as a tiny dot somewhere in this picture. and, to further baffle us and put things in perspective, it’s estimated that there are 500,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe. and that’s a low estimate. 500 billion galaxies, when even a single galaxy is beyond the ken of our understanding.
i’m rambling, i know. it’s just that every now and then i think about the size and age of the universe and i’m confronted with our, for lack of a better word, smallness. ‘smallness’ doesn’t even begin to apply, actually, as relative to the size of the universe our existence, in both temporal and quantum terms, can’t even be measured. we are to the universe as a single short-lived atom on the hair of the worlds smallest ant is to our entire planet. trying to reconcile our short lived tiny-ness with the universes long lived vastness is, as far as i can tell, impossible. and we as a species are in-between. in-between everything. unaware of our role in the existence of the universe (remember, there’s not a single part of you that is less than 15,000,000,000 years old) and unaware even of the nature of our own human existence (you are comprised of roughly 50,000,000,000,000 cells, how well do you know any of them?). our sense of self in no way is based on what we actually know about where we come from (the universe) and of what we are made (50 trillion cells working in concert with one another). and i, like most people, am completely baffled by this. trying to in any way make sense of any true, ontological, aspect of our existence makes my head both lose weight and want to explode. but yet somehow we are a part of the universe. we have all been here for 15 billion years in some form or another. our matter and energy have cycled through, or will cycle through, every other thing in the universe. and yet we define ourselves as short lived humans, concerned about 401-k’s, cholesterol, record sales, and the price of milk (soy or other).
i can only hope that at some point, either in this life or after it, we have a better understanding of what exactly is going on. it’s possible that even describing the universe in any conventionally quantifiable sense (light, matter, etc) might be completely erroneous. the actual nature and/or existence of the universe might involve forms or states of being that we cannot even begin to comprehend. and yet we’re all a part of it, and we have been since the beginning (assuming the actual existence of time, which most likely is an irrelevant metric).
i hope that somehow we all somehow understand. and i hope that when we do we like what we find out.
-moby
p.s-oh, here’s the picture that makes my head want to explode. a couple of trillion stars, 8 million light years across, 6 billion light years from us:
