How Small We Really Are

do you ever look up at the stars at night and allow your mind to drift? do you wonder what all is out there? ever think about just how big this universe really is? well, if you're a nerd like me, you do this quite often. the following passsage is from a book that i've been reading entitled In The Presence Of Mystery.

"we live in this continuously expanding universe. it is a very large one. to get an idea of the amount of matter and space involved, begin with a pea about one-third of an inch in diameter. let that stand for the earth (a little less than eight thousand miles in diameter). put the pea next to a very large beach ball, one full yard in diameter, to represent the sun (eight hundred sixty-four thousand miles in diameter). now, put the pea at one end of a football field and the ball at the other end, about one hundred ten yards apart. that approximates the average distance between earth and sun (ninety-three million miles). the earth is quite close to the sun compared to the outermost planets. *pluto's average distance from the sun is forty times as far as earth's. if the whole solar system out ot pluto were shrunk to one inch, on that scale the nearest star would be ninety yards away. our solar system is three-fourths of the way out from the center of a cluster of stars known to us as the milky way, a galaxy with as many as perhaps three hundred billion stars. there are an estimated hundred billion such galaxies in the known universe, each of them averaging another hundred billion stars or so. this speck of rock called earth can seem insignificant in a universe where even our entire milky way galaxy is lost among a hundred billion others. in a few million years our sun will follow the normal course in the life of a small to medium sized star, first bloating out into a "red giant" burning the earth raw and then collapsing and dying."

over a hundred billion galaxies! i'll never be able to comprehend that. scientists estimate that our planet was formed approximately fourteen billion years ago. meaning that even on our little speck of rock called earth, our lives won't even be a tiny dot on the timeline of this planet. so, why we we still think we're so imporant? why do we persist that our lives on this planet mean anything? we get so caught up on the 'american dream'....fancy car, big house, etc, that we completely lose sight of the much bigger picture. when our speck of a life is up on this rock and we're dead and gone...what then? what about your eternal life? so, what's more important, planning for tomorrow, or eternity?



*apparently pluto is no longer a planet. i'm not sure how they (whoever they are) decided this (nor do i care). i just know that its really far away from here.