Do you understand how small we are?

Chesterton said:

Vast spaces = no meaning. That's perfectly logical.

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Makes sense to me! We're so small as to be literally unnoticeable. Our planet, let alone the animals on it, are practically nothing.

It's like giving meaning to a bit of dust on the back of your fridge. You don't, because it's so insignificant.

1611AV said:

Praise God! He created and has a name for each and every star, according to scripture. Wow, just wow.

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Even so, what do you think this says about God's promise to Abraham? He said his sons would be more numerous in the sky. What did He mean? The 100-400 billion in the milky way, or perhaps the 3x10²² stars in the visible universe?

Either way ragnarök is a long way off if that's how you read the promise.

1611AV said:

Praise God! He created and has a name for each and every star, according to scripture. Wow, just wow.

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Why did he create all that stuff, just for us? We're not even going to see most of it. Seems kinda pointless to me.

Ayersy said:

Makes sense to me! We're so small as to be literally unnoticeable. Our planet, let alone the animals on it, are practically nothing.

It's like giving meaning to a bit of dust on the back of your fridge. You don't, because it's so insignificant.

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That's a valid emotional, poetic sentiment; it's just not logical.

Ayersy said:

Makes sense to me! We're so small as to be literally unnoticeable. Our planet, let alone the animals on it, are practically nothing.

It's like giving meaning to a bit of dust on the back of your fridge. You don't, because it's so insignificant.

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What would you say to someone who said 'Meaning is an expression of human emotion. Talking about finding objective meaning is incoherent as, whenever we're talking about meaning, we're talking about a subjective and personal expression of value.' I don't think that's quite nihilism, but it's where I am with the subject and I'd be interested if you had critiques or arguments against it.

You inspired a quick blog entry (Here sans images)

If we do a google or youtube search on size differences you quickly get a few examples showing how small our sun is relative other stars. That in itself can be very humbling and awe inspiring. But there's more, and I think this might blow your mind.

I'll try to keep it simple, to make it as understandable as possible



We'll start somewhat small, say our solar system. I wanted to visualize the solarsystem graphically and to scale. Something I found very very difficult, given the sizes present. One has to make such a HUGE picture for a planet such as mercury to fill even one pixel that my (hopelessly inadequate and - for this task - unsuited) software crashed. (If you attempt this, use vector graphics) I have not tried later, but I could easily draw it using the proper software. Problem is, with the sizes involved it wouldn't make much sense.



To illustrate you can use a roll of toilet paper. Draw the sun on one end, make sure not to draw it bigger than 1 cm. Then you can, if the roll is about 43 meters long (141 feet), barely fit pluto on the other end.

The earth would be one meter away from the sun at this scale and have a diameter of roughly 0.09 mm. (0.0036 inches). Pretty hard to spot.





But, our solar system is pretty small, actually

Enter the Milky Way. Our home is a large flat disc of stars. MANY stars. About 100 to 400 billion of them. It's a little hard to count them from our vantage point. And it's wide, so wide that if you hitched a ride on a photon (a beam of light) it would take you a hundred thousand years to cross the galaxy across it's diameter. Keep in mind that at that speed travelling from the earth to the moon would take 1.2 seconds. A journey which took the Apollo 11 four days.


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The Milky way, our home.



The milky way is big, and on a photo showing every star as a single point there are so many it would appear as a layer of white dust on a black background. Yes, our galaxy is big. But it's not the only galaxy.



Say we hitch a ride on our photon for a million years in any one given direction from earth. Then we stop and take a look around us, making a new map of our surroundings. At this distance the universe appears almost empty.


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A few galaxies close by. This group contains about 700 billion stars, yet notice how empty the space they occupy seems.



Zooming out ten times, and we get a larger cluster of galaxies, and space seems less empty. In this map every single non-black pixel is a whole galaxy!


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Galaxies galore. The virgo supercluster of galaxies.
It contains at least 100 groups of galaxies, trillions of stars.



This is getting impressive, isn't it? And quite impossible to really understand. But wait, if we zoom even further out, or more accurately map all we CAN see from the earth this is how the universe will appear:


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The visible universe. This contains about ten million superclusters each with trillions upon trillions of stars, and many many times that many planets.

It's HUGE. And notice how it seems like a latticework, dust clumping a little together in an interesting pattern. This is as far as we can see. Here, as far as our telescopes are concerned, the universe ends. And when we see this far out - in any direction - we see galaxies. Billions and billions of them. The light from each of which has taken almost 13.7 billion years to travel from it's original stars all the way to our cameras.

To show you what the universe looked like roughly 13.7 billion years ago, here's a photo taken by the Hubble space telescope in 2003-2004. It is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and is of a tiny area of the sky which appears completely blank and empty to other telescopes. It shows approximately 100 000 galaxies, the most distant of them is about 13 billion lightyears from earth. That means that if the universe did not expand it would take us 13 billion years travelling at the speed of light - the fastest speed there is - to reach it.

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The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field. This image shows 100 000 galaxies. The light from which was about 13 billion years old when the picture was taken in 2004 (not that much older now in other words)





And you thought an elephant was big ;-)

Ayersy said:

Why did he create all that stuff, just for us? We're not even going to see most of it. Seems kinda pointless to me.

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Yep. I certainly don't think we're the only ones around. It's too illogical.
Not that I think we're visited by gray skinned aliens who have an affection for probing lone hermits.... Rear ends.

Nabobalis said:

That to me is the great thing about it. Hopefully the more insignificant we realise we are, the more caring we will become towards each other and to this planet we live on.

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We might. The problem is we're too focused on stuff like Janet Jackson's chest popping out during a performance, or Britney Spears shaving her head. Or some "reality star" making a fool of him or her self.

In short, humanity is too darn stupid.

Raise a hand everyone who's with me in building an O'Neill cylinder for the "intellectual elite" (at least as per creationist standards) and bugger off to another solar system.

*raises hand*

faith guardian said:

Raise a hand everyone who's with me in building an O'Neill cylinder for the "intellectual elite" (at least as per creationist standards) and bugger off to another solar system.

*raises hand*

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I'd like to volunteer a few people.

DontTreadOnMike said:

Here's an inspirational video for those who like this sort of thing. It's a little more confrontational in places than I would have liked it to be. And there may be some NSFW language but I can't remember.

YouTube - Science Saved My Soul.

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Haha, I was just about to post this same video!

I've mentioned this before, and have never had anyone address it:

Imagine you're a 3 dimensional being existing in a 3 dimensional space (which you are). It doesn't matter whether you're 6 feet tall, or 6 trillion light years tall. Whether the space around you is infinite or not, you will have to perceive it as infinite. So the fact that the universe appears very large or infinite tells us nothing that doesn't logically follow from the fact that we are 3D beings.

If imagining vast numbers and spaces invokes emotion in you, fine, but don't mistake that for something on which to base a reasoned conclusion.

I realize how small we are which is what amuses me when the human species as a whole tries to act like it is so amazing. Heck, just look at humans compared to many other species on this planet like whales.

I also chuckle when people only think earth has intelligent life. If one believes in God/a creator then it is silly to me to think only this planet would have got life. If one doesn't believe in God then I think the odds are there has to be some intelligent life somewhere out there in the universe.

Jro said:

Start naming 'em.

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I cant, Im not God. But neither can you or any other man or science at this time.

faith guardian said:

Even so, what do you think this says about God's promise to Abraham? He said his sons would be more numerous in the sky. What did He mean? The 100-400 billion in the milky way, or perhaps the 3x10²² stars in the visible universe? Either way ragnarök is a long way off if that's how you read the promise.

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This is a spiritual and not phisical. This is one that Paul cites in Galations 3:8, not Genesis 12:1-3. This is of the uttermost importance, for it shows that the stars of heaven represent a spiritual seed that will come through Jesus Christ, "the son of Abraham" (Matt 1:1) while the sand of the sea represents twelve literal tribes of physical Israelites who get a physical piece of property. We call this the difference between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven.

Ayersy said:

Why did he create all that stuff, just for us? We're not even going to see most of it. Seems kinda pointless to me.

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His Glory.