Please forgive in advance any mistakes I make. I am no astronomer, no physicist. I am simply curious… What is the largest number that makes tangible sense? There are exceptions, but for most of us we hear million, billion, trillion and it means a lot, a whole lot, and really a whole lot. If I were to count one number per second 1 2 3 4 5… all the way to a million without stopping it would take 11 1/2 days. A billion? Almost 32 years. And a trillion, 32,000 years. Our sun is 2.7 million miles around and 93 million miles away from Earth. And our sun is only one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. There are ten billion galaxies in the universe each with 100 billion stars. That makes a billion trillion stars in what we know of the universe. That is a one with 21 zeroes after it. If all of the stars were laid out before me like sand on a beach, it would take me 32 trillion years to count each one. The universe is 14 billion years old. Our planet, somewhere around 4 billion. Humans and their ancestors, about 6 million. Modern humans only about 300,000 and civilizations somewhere around 6,000. This rock floating in space we call home is wobbling on its axis at a thousand miles an hour, hurtling around the sun at 66,000 miles an hour, while the solar system itself moves at 500,000 miles an hour. And me? I am one man. I’ll live somewhere shy of a hundred years then be largely and quickly forgotten once I am gone. But somehow, in all of this incomprehensible vastness, I am here. You are here. And if only for these few moments we found each other and that is no small thing. It’s easy to think in the midst of all of this that something as small as words scratched on a page is meaningless. But in all of space, all of time, in this moment, some connection, some spark found it’s way in the darkness. And there is little that matters more.
Connection is an amazing thing. Thanks for bringing it back into perspective.