Unimaginable Vastness

I have been reading Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan, and in only the first few chapters he does an incredible job of putting in perspective just how small and insignificant we are. How small and insignificant our wars and quarrels are. How even in relation to just the Earth, we are but "a thin film" covering its surface. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and hundreds of billions of galaxies in our Universe (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 other stars each possibly with multiple planets and each planet with possibly multiple moons).When we look at these other galaxies, we are seeing them as they were (for some) a over billion years ago. That's over 1,000,000,000,000 years. As Sagan states in his book, in relation to the age of the Universe, humans have been around for the last 0.002% of its history.

It is incredible to me to really think about those numbers and what they mean. How can there NOT be at least one other planet out there that has developed life? There is an insane amount of knowledge about the Universe that we don't know even exists. There are places and things out there that no one has or could imagine. There is so much more for us to discover. It is in our nature to want to know more, and find new places and things.

These numbers also make me stop and think, as Sagan has described, just how insignificant our fights and problems are. Look at Earth (the small dot in the rightmost sunbeam) in the picture that Sagan based his book on and think about the words he used to describe it.

                                                    (Image: NASA, Voyager 1)

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." -Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot