All things are defined via their relations to other things. For example, the reason I believe myself to be a patient person is because I have experienced other people who had little of the stuff. Jeff Bezos isn’t rich because he has a trillion dollars; he is rich because he has a trillion dollars and the rest of us have far less. One hour is a long time when compared to a second, yet it is minuscule when compared to a year.
Reading about the solar system within which we all reside has made me feel truly tiny. We are all generally aware that Earth is small in comparison to the sun and to other galaxies of stars, but the actual numbers are beyond staggering. Not only are there hundreds of billions of stars in a galaxy, and not only are there hundreds of billions of galaxies in a universe, but there are hundreds of billions of universes. Astronomers have concluded that “there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth was formed, [and] more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.” Compared to the celestial bodies above, we humans are infinitesimal.
The field of astrophysics is interesting because it not only concerns itself with the biggest of entities, but also with the smallest, because in order to better understand the cosmos within which we reside, we must better understand it’s building blocks. For example, we know that “the element carbon can be found in more kinds of molecules than the sum of all other kinds of molecules combined.” Or we might be interested in knowing the chemical compounds that comprise a drop of water so that we might some day be able to find it (or create it) on another planet. Conversely to the unfathomable expanse of space, “there are more molecules of water in a cup of the stuff than there are cups of water in all the world’s oceans.” Compared to a molecule of water, we humans are gargantuan.
So, for those of us to whom astronomy and astrophysics are interesting yet largely beyond basic comprehension, the take-away is simple: Life is about perspective.
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