No, that's not the trade deficit. Not even the budget deficit. Big numbers like these have a way of making other numbers look small. Or, feels small. It used to be that more than ten - what's in people's fingers - was a big number. Then folks learned to count their toes as well. So twenty was the new large number. Anything over that was uncountable.
As soon as our ancestors learned to realize that there really are numbers too big to ponder or to grapple with their minds, new words started to get created. Today, actual words to describe plenty, a lot, huge, etc. are substantially way too many to enumerate here. It even has come to the point when words that are too long has a label - "Sesquipedalian". And so the very idea of extreme wordiness, words on steroids, is Sesquipedalian loquaciousness. I'll stop there because I have your attention now.
Let's start small again. Many countless moons ago (remember, folks used to only know the phases of the moon in addition to sunrise and sunset as a gauge for the passing of time), people thought the fields they could see, the horizon from the seashore were limits to where they could go. Once they realized that other people lived from far away, what were beyond the mountains changed their views on what was big. The earth was much bigger still.
Then Galileo showed the world that a handful of what looked like stars in the heavens were planets, or wanderers of the heavens. The solar system was big. Then our sun, around which the wanderers revolved around, was just one of the "thousands of stars" up there, and not a very big one either. The sun was average. Actually, smaller than average. Early on, people even thought the earth was the center of the universe ('universe' - very loosely defined, as it were). Then followed a revelation that a million earths could fit within the sun. Stars became too numerous to count as telescopes got bigger. The sun assumed a tiny spot on a nondescript location - now too small because on a dark night a milky band of hazy light was filled with 'millions' of stars, in some of them will fit a million suns - per star. That band of swirling light and gas is the Milky Way Galaxy - gaining the title of the big kahuna. It was our universe for over centuries of awe and profound contemplation. It was a world in a steady state of orderly existence. We gazed at the night sky for the quiet comfort it gave us when everything else seemed chaotic in our own little patch. Even Albert Einstein thought that was all the world there was.
One cloudless night on Mt. Palomar an eccentric astronomer, named Edwin Hubble, peering through the eye piece of one of the biggest telescopes then, saw that those hazy patches of light were not twinkling stars at all. They were individual galaxies, believed then to have millions of stars in them. The Large Magellanic cloud that ancient seafarers used as a marker in the night sky was a galaxy, again with millions of 'stars' (later found to have an estimated 30 billion stars in it). When Hubble had Einstein looked into the eyepiece, the brilliant physicist, for the first time, realized he had been wrong - one of a few times that he was, as he came to realize. Hubble would reveal that those other galaxies were moving away from each other at tremendous speeds in all directions, like a flock of starlings spooked by a ground snake.
The Hubble Space Telescope today tells us that those millions of stars per galaxy are too small a number. The Milky Way alone may have as many as two hundred billion stars (with a B). Its nearest neighboring galaxy, The Andromeda, has a few hundred billion more stars, or could have a trillion stars. That is mind blowing. But wait ...
Now, we're told there could be as many as Two Trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Two trillion Milky Ways and Andromeda's!
As a result, there could be as many as 700 million trillion terrestrial planets! That's not counting gaseous planets, like Jupiter or Neptune. Terrestrial, as in rocky planets. The odds that just a handful of them could harbor some kind of life, similar to or different from ours, is extremely a very high probability.
As humanity begins to look more seriously about its place in the scheme of things, it had to grapple with a new measure of humility. To mean nothing in a world of over six billion people is one thing, but for each of us to become invisibly less than nothingness, is another. To be humble in that sense means to be profoundly amoebic of pride or grandeur.
What has Seguey have to say? Remember it - the extra terrestrial being in our midst? It lived as an amoeba at one time, it had been around for 500 years as a self-aware being and its origin is from somewhere in a far distant point in the cosmos. Here's what it says,
When humans think of an observable universe, they must also think that there is something beyond what is observable. There has to be. I cannot know for sure but what I know is that there cannot be a boundary. Every time I think of a boundary, no matter how far it is from where I am, I still have to wonder about what is there then, past the edge of the boundary. And beyond it. We cannot say nothing. The moment we do that, we have to ask this: Why doesn't anything from where there is something, right at the edge, not spill over into where there is nothing? And we need to think about what is keeping everything together that is in the confines of the "observable" universe, keeping it in place as a distinct entity from where there is nothing.
Seguey is not much help. We know that asking these questions puts us in a position of total helplessness. When we think large of ourselves, or when someone belittles us, the futility of such a behavior is naturally stupid. But wait! Here's more from Seguey.
If we, as citizens of the universe, if you will, are bestowed with a mind and heart to believe that somewhere up there or right in our midst, right where we are, in the stifling chaos of disorder and helplessness, is a being so powerful and limitless in capacity, as to pay attention to each and everyone of us ... and sometimes even answers our question or pleadings for help, then there lies the simplest answer to a complex mystery of all. For each of us to have the capacity to think that, to believe and to have faith in such a Being, it is the greatest source of awe and wonder. And why do we have a choice to think that? Well, to have that choice, we're given the greatest gift of all - the freedom to guide and determine the path to our destiny.
One cloudless night on Mt. Palomar an eccentric astronomer, named Edwin Hubble, peering through the eye piece of one of the biggest telescopes then, saw that those hazy patches of light were not twinkling stars at all. They were individual galaxies, believed then to have millions of stars in them. The Large Magellanic cloud that ancient seafarers used as a marker in the night sky was a galaxy, again with millions of 'stars' (later found to have an estimated 30 billion stars in it). When Hubble had Einstein looked into the eyepiece, the brilliant physicist, for the first time, realized he had been wrong - one of a few times that he was, as he came to realize. Hubble would reveal that those other galaxies were moving away from each other at tremendous speeds in all directions, like a flock of starlings spooked by a ground snake.
The Hubble Space Telescope today tells us that those millions of stars per galaxy are too small a number. The Milky Way alone may have as many as two hundred billion stars (with a B). Its nearest neighboring galaxy, The Andromeda, has a few hundred billion more stars, or could have a trillion stars. That is mind blowing. But wait ...
Now, we're told there could be as many as Two Trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Two trillion Milky Ways and Andromeda's!
As a result, there could be as many as 700 million trillion terrestrial planets! That's not counting gaseous planets, like Jupiter or Neptune. Terrestrial, as in rocky planets. The odds that just a handful of them could harbor some kind of life, similar to or different from ours, is extremely a very high probability.
As humanity begins to look more seriously about its place in the scheme of things, it had to grapple with a new measure of humility. To mean nothing in a world of over six billion people is one thing, but for each of us to become invisibly less than nothingness, is another. To be humble in that sense means to be profoundly amoebic of pride or grandeur.
What has Seguey have to say? Remember it - the extra terrestrial being in our midst? It lived as an amoeba at one time, it had been around for 500 years as a self-aware being and its origin is from somewhere in a far distant point in the cosmos. Here's what it says,
When humans think of an observable universe, they must also think that there is something beyond what is observable. There has to be. I cannot know for sure but what I know is that there cannot be a boundary. Every time I think of a boundary, no matter how far it is from where I am, I still have to wonder about what is there then, past the edge of the boundary. And beyond it. We cannot say nothing. The moment we do that, we have to ask this: Why doesn't anything from where there is something, right at the edge, not spill over into where there is nothing? And we need to think about what is keeping everything together that is in the confines of the "observable" universe, keeping it in place as a distinct entity from where there is nothing.
Seguey is not much help. We know that asking these questions puts us in a position of total helplessness. When we think large of ourselves, or when someone belittles us, the futility of such a behavior is naturally stupid. But wait! Here's more from Seguey.
If we, as citizens of the universe, if you will, are bestowed with a mind and heart to believe that somewhere up there or right in our midst, right where we are, in the stifling chaos of disorder and helplessness, is a being so powerful and limitless in capacity, as to pay attention to each and everyone of us ... and sometimes even answers our question or pleadings for help, then there lies the simplest answer to a complex mystery of all. For each of us to have the capacity to think that, to believe and to have faith in such a Being, it is the greatest source of awe and wonder. And why do we have a choice to think that? Well, to have that choice, we're given the greatest gift of all - the freedom to guide and determine the path to our destiny.
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