A Million Seems Like a Lot, But It's Chump Change

I thought of another scale-related topic while writing my second to last entry. Why are these topics positive? I think because, as I've said before, looking at the world as it really is helps put your problems in perspective, and a little perspective is always a good thing.

What strikes me is how mind-bogglingly large numbers are the rule in the universe, not the exception. We think of a million or a billion as very large figures, but most things in the universe, both on the largest of scales and the smallest completely outpace those puny numbers.

Look at the number of cells in the human body. It's estimated to be 50 trillion, and that just counts the cells that are actually us. The flora that lives in and on us (bacterial cells are much smaller than human tissue cells) number four quadrillion! That's a four followed by 15 zeros. And, going smaller, we saw two entries ago that the number of atoms in the human body is roughly seven followed by 27 zeros. Seven octillion atoms, or, stated another way, seven billion billion billion. And that's just in one of us. Try and imagine the number of cells, or perish the calculation, the number of atoms contained in all 6.7 billion of us!

And we're just one species on the planet. How many cells exist in total across the entire planet, in both bacterial and other unicellular creatures and in all higher, multi-cellular plants and animals? I can't find definite numbers, but just in terms of bacterial life it's estimated that there is five nonillion (5 followed by 30 zeroes) individual bacterial cells across the planet and in the oceans. That's akin to taking five billion of anything, multiplying that by a billion, then multiplying the result by a trillion. That's just the bacterial life, most of which we can't even see.

Can your brain encompass a figure that massive? Mine can't. I doubt many people can truly grasp any figure on that grand a scale. And yet we have verifiable examples of numbers that large all around us.

Next time you're in your kitchen, dunk your finger in boiling water. Okay, don't actually do that. But imagine it. You know it's hot! We've all probably come into contact accidentally with small bits of boiling water or oil, and it's an uncomfortable experience.

Water boils at 212°F. A candle flame burns at 1,830°F. Lightning creates temperatures of 54,000°F on average. Even the lowest of these temperatures can kill most life on this planet. And they are insignificant on a cosmic scale. Our sun's core burns at roughly 28 million degrees Fahrenheit. The core temperature of a star as it collapses just before supernova is 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. And, as absurdly hot as that is, it's nothing compared to the theoretical hottest temperature possible. That, the Planck temperature, which is rare (it occurred only in the first few nearly unmeasurable instants after the Big Bang, and in the crushing final moments of a black hole) is computed to be about a quarter of a hundred nonillion degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 followed by 32 zeros.) That's a measure of heat completely incomprehensible to the human mind.

Coming back to our local corner of the universe, here's a small snippet from the Wikipedia entry on the Sun. This is a description of what goes on during the nuclear fusion reaction at the Sun's core.

The proton-proton chain [the fusion reaction] occurs around 9.2 × 10³⁷ times each second in the core of the Sun. Since this reaction uses four protons, it converts about 3.7 × 10³⁸ protons (hydrogen nuclei) to helium nuclei every second (out of a total of ~8.9 × 10⁵⁶ free protons in the Sun), or about 6.2 × 10¹¹ kg per second. Since fusing hydrogen into helium releases around 0.7% of the fused mass as energy, the Sun releases energy at the matter–energy conversion rate of 4.26 million metric tons per second, 383 yottawatts (3.83×10²⁶ W), or 9.15 × 10¹⁰ megatons of TNT per second.

Those are ginormous numbers. And that happens every second!

The lesson here is the same lesson I've spun at least a dozen times on this blog, in different forms. Remember your place in the universe. Remember that you are beyond insignificant in the grand scheme of things. You tiny blip of existence, your, if you're lucky 80 to 90 years pales in comparison to the scale of just about everything else around you. So just accept it. You don't matter. None of us do. Therefore you're free. Free to make your life whatever you want it to be, because ultimately you and your small group of equally insignificant entities are the only bits of matter in the entire universe that care.

Keep yourself in perspective. It's not as bad as you think it is, and nowhere near as bad as it could be. Remember the supernova.

Much To My Neighbors' Unknowing Relief

It's an extremely positive situation for our neighbor, or neighbor's real estate agent or the home owner's association representative or whoever it was that reported us to the county that there is no cosmic system for retribution, no karmic spider waiting around the corner. If there was, he or she would be in for a doozy of a payback, having pulled their pendulum far into the deficit region. And right now I'd wish it on them, so I'm glad that the universe didn't notice our stupid little transaction.

I'm glad that there won't be any cosmic comeuppance because ultimately I know that people are often narrow-minded, and do stupid things to each other without considering the full consequences of their actions. That doesn't make them bad people. Just people. And we all do it, some more often than others, I'm sure, but still we all take a share of the guilt occasionally.

And one day some other person will do something short-sighted and mildly-vindictive to them, and make their lives more difficult than they really should be. And it won't be because of some metaphysical balance sheet. Crappy things just happen sometimes. To me. To you.

And to you...you know who you are.

All Things Must Pass

"What am I writing about today?" It's a question I've been asking myself everyday this year since January 1. Sometimes the answer comes easily and other times it's a struggle. But one way or another the answer does come and that day's entry gets completed. And then the next day's entry, and then the next, etc. Eventually the entire years worth of entries will be written and this blog experiment will be finished. Kate and I will move on to the next thing, whatever that is, and that will last as long as it does until it's finished.

We'll move from thing to thing, day to day, moment to moment, each element ending as surely as it began. Because that's the one constant in the universe. All things must pass. As undeniably as all things have a beginning, they will all one day have an end. Our days, our weeks, our years, our lives; all of them eventually tying up as neatly as they started.

Where are the Mayans today? How about the great Roman Republic, a civilization that dominated most of Europe for hundreds of years? Or the Greeks of antiquity? All have been wiped from the earth, except for their legacy and ruins. We're not any different. We like to think we are, of course, but it's quite clear from history and the nature of the universe that the current state of our planet is transient. One day the United States and all the other major powers will cease to exist, replaced by some other dominant power. Which itself will one day be replaced, until eventually humanity itself has run its course and comes to an end.

In millions of years our sun will supernova, and it, and the inner planets, including earth will be removed from the galaxy, to be recycled into some other system somewhere else.

Because all things must pass. Rather, all things will pass. There's not an overarching necessity. It's simply a fundamental feature of the structure of reality. Just as all things began simply because they did, all things will end because they will. Infinity is just a numerical construct. It doesn't exist in nature.

I'm sure I've riffed on this theme before. This is all a positive thing because nothing, including your problems and your issues are permanent. Everything is in flux at all times, and all of your issues will have resolution one day. They may be replaced with other problems, but rest assured that those will be resolved one day, too. Sadness is temporary. As is happiness. Suffering, like every other thing in the universe, is a transitory experience. So why focus on it? Let it go early, knowing that it will eventually go on its own. Don't latch on to your suffering and hold it like a security blanket. It doesn't serve you, and, just like any security blanket, it will eventually degrade, rot and fall away.

Your life is transitory. Enjoy it while you can, because eventually you will pass. Is there anything beyond that? You all know my position on that, but I can't possibly know for sure, as can anyone else. Don't stake your happiness in a life none of us can know for sure is there. Live in the now. Experience life while you're alive and let the afterlife take care of itself. If there is something after, than you've lost nothing. But if there isn't, and you spent your meager few decades of life pinning for death...well you won't be here to feel silly, but you probably would if you were.

And the concept of "silly" will eventually pass.

Us, Relative to Everything Else

This is an entry I've been wanting to do for a very long time, but I've been putting off because I knew writing it the way I wanted to would take a good four or five hours. But it's a topic that's very meaningful for me, so I knew one day I'd make the investment. It's a bit long, but worth it. I hope you'll invest the ten minutes or so it might take to read it. It may change the way you view the world.

You may have seen the images I'm using in this illustration before. They've been floating around the web for a while. I'd credit them, but they apparently appeared anonymously originally, so there are no credits to be given. I'll just give heartfelt thanks to whoever created them.

We humans imagine ourselves to be very important, our problems and issues of vast significance. And some of us imagine themselves better than their fellow humans, or more enlightened than the rest of humanity, and sometimes commit horrible atrocities for either personal gain or to propagate their view of the world to other people. So let's try and find out, in the grand scheme of things, how important we humans really are.

To begin, let's take an average human. A single, solitary individual. Now imagine that single individual in the company of 6.772 billion other individuals, the entire world population, as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau. Each of these individuals, weight averaged between the sexes, weighs, on average 150 pounds. That gives a total mass for our species of roughly 1.015 trillion pounds. That's a scale breaker.

But compare that to the planet we all live on. The earth, measuring at one earth mass (obviously) weighs roughly 1.317 x 10 to the 25th pounds, or 10,317,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. A bit bigger. The weight of our entire species, every member of our population combined is a sneeze in the ocean of our planets mass. Now let's compare that planet to it's cosmic kin.

Here's earth, relative in size to the other planets (or dwarf planet, in Pluto's case) in our solar system smaller than earth. Impressive, aren't we? We could punt Pluto into next week.



Okay. Now here we are relative to all the planets in our solar system, the larger bodies included.



Not quite so impressive anymore. Earth's equatorial radius (ER) is 7,926 miles and has an earth mass of one. Pluto looks tiny relative to earth, with an ER of only 1,429 miles and an earth mass of .0026 (meaning it's 26 ten thousandths as massive as earth), it barely exists in our comparison next to Jupiter. Jupiter has an ER of 88,731 miles and an earth mass of 377.833, meaning it's 377 times more massive than earth. This shrinks earths place in the cosmos significantly, and we have a long way to go. Here we are relative to our sun.



The sun has an ER of 432,163 miles (earth, if you remember had an ER of only 7,926 miles) and an earth mass of 332,830. The sun accounts for more than 98% of the total mass of our solar system. It would take 109 earths, end to end, to stretch the distance of the sun across and 1.3 million earths to fill it's entire volume. It takes light, traveling at 299,792,458 meters per second 8 minutes and 19 seconds to travel from the sun to earth. The sun's core reaches temperatures of 27,000,000° F and has an atmospheric pressure 340 billion times more intense than Earth's air pressure at sea level. Beginning to feel a bit puny? Maybe a little bit insignificant? That's good. Let's forge on.

As big as our sun is, relative to us, it's tiny compared to some of its compatriots. Here's our sun compared to other known stars.



The small print that's hard to read says, "Jupiter is about 1 pixel in size" and "Earth is invisible at this scale." Incredible, right? Our sun, our massive star, 332,830 times more massive than our planet is a ten pound weakling next to the size of other stars. Sirius, the Dog Star, part of the Big Dog constellation, is 8.6 light years away from us, meaning it takes light 8.6 years to travel from Sirius to earth. Compare that to the 8.25 minutes it takes our sun's light to reach us.

Pollux is an orange giant star 34 light years away from earth in the constellation of Gemini. It has 8.8 times the radius of our sun and is 32 times brighter. Arcturus is a red giant star in the constellation Boötes, 36.7 light years from earth with a total power output 180 times that of our sun. You can see that the relative size difference between our sun and Arcturus is larger than the relative difference Jupiter and our sun. At Arcturus's scale the earth is invisible, and there are 6.772 billion of us living on that invisible mote. Ever read Horton Hears a Who? Continuing on.

Here's where Arcturus, and our sun by proxy, sits relative to some even larger stars.



That tiny little orange circle just to the left of Rigel is Arcturus. We see Pollux, Sirius and our sun further to the left. It's hard to read, but the small print says that our sun is only one screen pixel at this scale, and Jupiter is invisible. That's our massive, life-giving sun, a mere dot compared to Antares. Antares, a neighbor 600 light years away in our Milky Way galaxy, in the constellation Scorpius is classified as a Class M Red Supergiant star with a diameter 800 times that of our sun, with 65,000 times the total power output. Our sun gives off enough power to warm our planet at a distance of 92.5 million miles. That alone is a staggering amount of power, and Antares gives off 65,000 times more power than that. At 600 light years away, more than 18 times further away from us than Pollux or Arcturus it still ends up being the sixteenth brightest star in the night sky.

And Antares isn't even the biggest star known today. That title goes to VY Canis Majoris a red hypergiant star more than 5,000 light years away from earth that was recently calculated, at its upper size to be 2,100 times the size of our sun! That's a little more than two and a half times the size of Antares. Massive by ANY definition.

Compare yourself to VY Canis Majoris. And then consider that VY Canis Majoris, as big as it is, is just one star amidst the estimated 200 to 400 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, a galaxy which is estimated to be roughly 100,000 light years across. Remember from earlier that light from our sun takes 8.25 minutes to get to earth? It would take that same light 100,000 years to cross our galaxy, passing billions of stars and an innumerable number of planets. Our sun is estimated to be only 26,000 light years from the galactic center, and it takes 225 to 250 million years for our solar system to complete a single galactic orbit. Compare yourself and the sun you orbit to the space required to fit 200 to 400 billion other stars, many much bigger than our sun. Is the fact that your neighbors lawn is bigger than yours really all that important by comparison?

Now realize that our Milky Way Galaxy is only one of an estimated 80 billion galaxies in the observable universe, containing 30 to 70 sextillion stars (that's a 3 or a 7 followed by 21 zeroes). We are orbiting a small sun, an afterthought amidst the 30 to 70 sextillion stellar relatives we share in our observable universe, the edge of which is 46.5 billion light years away.

But the universe is only 13.7 billion year old? How can we be seeing something whose light took 46.5 billion light years to travel to us? I quote wikipedia:

The age of the universe is about 13.7 billion years, but due to the expansion of space we are now observing objects that are now considerably farther away than a static 13.7 billion light-years distance. The edge of the observable universe is now located about 46.5 billion light-years away.

I know. Things are starting to get a bit mind-bending. I'll close with one further calculation. The observable universe consists of everything out there, the light of which has had time to reach us. That's why our observable universe centers on the planet earth. Not because we're especially significant, but because we are here, observing. Light from all around the expanding universe has been traveling towards us (and every other point in the universe) since it was first emitted. The light that has been able to reach us creates the outer sphere of the observable universe for us. Life on another planet at another point in the universe would have a different observable universe. Which begs the question, how much bigger is the universe than what is observable for us? There is stuff beyond that threshold. One scientist has estimated that the rest of the universe is 24 times the size of our observable universe. That's potentially another 80 billion galaxies 24 times over.

So here we are, feeling important and superior because of our microwave ovens and great literature. But we are a completely insignificant dot of nothing against the cosmic background. I mean really. Try and let the depth of what you just read sink in. We're a brief hiccup against cosmic space. Our entire civilization is a fraction of a blink of an eye against cosmic time. Our entire power output since the dawn of man wouldn't light a candle in the universe. We are so fragile compared to the monstrously violent, enormously powerful vacuum we orbit inside of.

Some of you know I'm an atheist. For me, compared to the awesome majesty which is just our observable universe, our small concepts of god can be a little petty and silly. Please keep reading. I don't mean to insult any of you that do believe in god. I just want to explain why this topic is so dear to my heart. In a universe so much mind-bogglingly bigger than us, the need for a creator god goes out the window. Our god concepts and religions have simply been us trying to understand our place in the world. Now we know our place, and it's much smaller and insignificant than we ever could have imagined. Just 400 years ago, prior to Galileo, the dominant view of the cosmos was that earth was directly at the center, with the sun orbiting the earth. We've learned quite a bit since then. As our significance in the universe decreases, the idea that an all powerful god would somehow stake his entire career on us gets less sensible.

The "my god is greater than your god" game is meaningless when placed against a backdrop 30 to 70 sextillion other stars. Why do none of our religious texts mention the entirety of god's creation? Because we didn't know about it when we wrote them. For me, all our religious beliefs do is separate us. Create "us against them" mentalities. They are harmful to human life, as is any divisive philosophy. Especially given how insignificant we are on the cosmic stage. Instead of laying a supernatural realm over our reality, just try and step back. Our universe is bigger, more complicated, and more amazing than anything man could ever dream up. And we are so unimportant in that context. The star Antares doesn't know we're here, and wouldn't care a whit if it did.

I've been asked by a few people, indirectly, (you know who you are) how I could possibly not believe in god. This is how. Human civilization has come, and will go, in an instant compared with the age of the universe. No story we can ever tell, no religious text we can ever formulate will be able to infuse meaning into such a brief stay on a such a infinitesimally tiny swath of universal real estate. The universe is far more than any human mind could ever encompass, and I'm happy to be forever entranced by that beauty. For me, having to involve a creator god simply diminishes the grandeur of the universe, in a desperate attempt to create meaning that just isn't there.

We humans are meaningless, except to each other. So instead of fighting over ancient beliefs, trying to dominate each other for no good reason, let's work together to better our world and our lives. No one's going to do it for us. Not the universe, for sure. We barely exist as far as it's concerned. There is no god entity out there to save us from ourselves. It's us and us alone. Let's make the best of our time here and stop arguing over meaningless philosophies.

Our place in the universe is a positive because it shows us that life is meaningless, except for the meaning we give it. Let's make that meaning universally good for once.

One planet, one people.

A Beautiful Concept

I want to share a thought I like to come back to occasionally and see what it kicks loose.

Ultimately, we are made of stardust. If you trace the history of the universe backwards to its inception at the big bang and then watch it unfold in fast forward, you'll witness the most dramatic story ever told.

The singularity, the universe before it was anything, was a near infinitely small but infinitely dense point, smaller than an atom, containing all the matter that would ultimately make up the mind-bogglingly vast cosmos we see today. How long did it exist in that state? Impossible to know. Time and space were wrapped up together inside that tiny point. But at some pivotal moment (language really doesn't have a good way to deal with time out of time) the singularity exploded.

The bang went out in all directions, filling the void with a perfectly homogeneous blanket of energy. Or nearly perfect. Slight inconsistencies in the early universe caused energy to coalesce more in certain areas than others, and as the universe cooled and matter was born from this energy, these pockets of matter/energy grew, becoming galaxies and stars and planets, and eventually...us.

Now view the evolution and growth of the cosmos as a life cycle. Infancy and childhood, followed by tumultuous changes, growing ever more complex and subdivided. Simple life on various planets comes into existence as young adulthood flowers, clearing the path for exponential spikes in diversity and complexity as the cosmos reaches adulthood. Then; a quantum leap forward. We (or other intelligent life elsewhere in the universe) emerge with a singular consciousness. A mind capable of self-awareness, capable of knowing that it, as an entity, exists. Capable of questioning itself and the universe. A mind constantly searching for answers.

Here's my favorite part. If we are made from stardust, born billions of years ago in distant, long-dead suns, our matter and minds forged by the long process of cosmic expansion, then our search for answers is actually the universe finally capable of and attempting to understand itself. We are all equal and natural extensions of the universe's long evolution. It was only a matter of time before something as vast and inexplicable as the cosmos developed a capability for self-examination.

"What a beautiful thought I just thought," thinks the universe.

Latifah is a Boy Named Jackson

Kate's entry summed it up.  My sister gave birth yesterday to a 7 lb 8 oz. baby boy.  It was the first time that Kate or I had ever been even peripherally involved in a childbirth, and it was amazing.  Steph was a trooper, with a record fast labor (7.5 hours), and a granite composure (of course I did see her for the first time after the epidural was administered, so I can't speak to her unmedicated state.)

Most of you that know me know that I don't believe in miracles.  Not the supernatural, violate the laws of physics type.  The universe is plenty miraculous without them.  And childbirth definitely falls into the category of an astounding yet perfectly explainable, mind-bogglingly complex, and utterly beautiful miracle.  To think that Stephanie and John, starting from a single cell, were able to, in nine months, cook up a perfectly formed mini-human is incredible. It's akin to a skyscraper, with a built-in set of blueprints, assembling itself from the dirt of it's foundation.  A building which then adapts to it's surroundings and grows ever more complex as time goes on.  That's miraculous at first blush.  Then add to that the fact that even the process of self-assembling humans has itself been tweaked, evolved, and self-assembled from chaos, and you have one the most beautiful, unlikely and elegant miracles in any corner of the universe.

This was the first time I'd seen a baby fresh from the pot.  It's amazing how alert and engaged he already was.  When he wasn't sleeping, Jackson would look at you, react to you, and smile (I swear we saw him do it.)  He was already finger-gripping and murmuring to himself.  With all that can go wrong in development, it's awe-inspiring that so many babies, like Jackson, come out flawless.  It's a perfect demonstration of the potency and resilience of life.

Welcome to the world, Jackson.

Don't take any wooden nickels.