Oh my heck!

We are small. In fact, we are incredibly small. The universe is large. Ok, it’s very, very large. Most people have no idea how insignificant we, Earth, and even the Sun are in relation to the universe. (Even those smarter than me.)

Tomorrow I’m going to randomly ask people how many stars they think exist in our own Milky Way galaxy. It will be interesting to hear their answers. (It’s thought that there are roughly 100 to 400 billion stars.)

Most of us want to have a sense of where we stand in relation to the cosmos. Often you hear someone say, “I felt so connected to everything at that moment.” But shouldn’t we have at least a vague sense of what that “everything” consists of, if such a statement is to possess any validity? Usually God, the purported creator of the cosmos, is considered to be someone you can have a relationship with. You can relate to him, her, or it on some sort of personal level. This presupposes that God exists on a scale accessible to humans. The creator’s power, wisdom, intelligence, consciousness, love—whatever anthropomorphic qualities we might assign to the ultimate mystery—are not so distant from our own as to make them impossible to perceive or comprehend.

The soundtrack for Cirque du Soleil’s newest show Corteo was released today. Corteo, which means “cortege” in Italian, is a joyous procession, a festive parade imagined by a clown. The show brings together the passion of the actor with the grace and power of the acrobat to plunge the audience into a theatrical world of fun, comedy and spontaneity situated in a mysterious space between heaven and earth. Buy the CD at iTunes.                                                         

Whenever I start to think this way, it’s easy to get swept away by the vastness that is around us. For whatever attributes the creation in which we exist possesses, the creator seemingly should possess in more abundance. Aren’t a mother and a father greater than their offspring? IBM commissioned a video in 1977 titled “Powers of Ten”, a video that takes us on a grand journey up and down from the scale of humans, outward to the furthest reaches of the universe and inward to the equally unfathomable quantum world. I urge you to take the journey. It’s astonishing.

We haven’t the slightest idea of where we stand in relation to even the material universe, not to mention any metaphysical realities that may exist (and probably do). None whatsoever. Our minds are too limited to hold such an understanding, even if each of us had the mind of an Einstein. I’m finding that embracing this insignificance can be exhilarating. Five million miles vs. a grain of sand. That’s the relation between our galaxy and our planet. And me? A sub-atomic particle on the grain—and that’s being generous, I’m probably not even that. More: if the Sun were the size of a grain of sand, then the nearest neighbor galaxy to us, Andromeda, would be 1,500,000 miles away. The nearest.

There are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe vastly further away from us than Andromeda. What we see of the cosmos when we look up at the night sky is essentially nothing, just a few thousand stars that lie near us in our corner of a single galaxy. I have no idea…

Add comment October 2nd, 2006