The Infinite Value of Being Small
Are we merely insignificant specks of life? In a cosmological context, that’s a matter of perspective.
The August sun burned our necks as we helped my grandfather with his wheat harvest. After sunset, my cousin and I would shower and consume huge plates of farm food. We would then retreat to the roof of a root cellar. About the size of a car, the roof was four feet off the ground. On a slightly sloping incline, we would lie on our backs and behold the stars and constellations.
I recall feeling awe as I witnessed the night sky. I have never seen so many stars since then. My grandparents’ isolated farm in northwestern Kansas nestled far away from light pollution.
My cousin inspired me. “You are looking at eternity,” he pronounced. “What you are seeing always was and always will be.” Then he explained what eternity meant.
I became mesmerized by the light show and felt so small as a boy beholding grandeur beyond my grasp. We would fill the night skies with our imaginations as we discussed galaxies, eternity, God, mortality, and mysteries of outer space.
Here’s some unsettling news: your face is home to dozens of tiny creatures known as Demodex. They are eight-legged arachnids related to ticks and spiders, and these mites spend their days tucked inside hair follicles on your face, gorging on body oils. They love your eyelids and eyebrows. When you sleep, they emerge from their cozy homes to meet and mate. But don’t rush to a mirror to find the colonizing creatures because they are too small to be seen with the naked eye. At 0.3 millimeters long, it takes five stretched-out adults to cover the head of a pin.
Relative to the size of adult humans, face mites are minuscule. Teeny-tiny. Itty-bitty. So, how small are humans, the gargantuan hosts for Demodex? Well, it depends on your viewpoint after some cosmic considerations.
Combining both men and women, the average North American adult human weighs about 177 lbs. or 0.0885 ton. Earth weighs 6.58 sextillion tons or 6,580,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.
But the Earth is really small.
Consider Jupiter, fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planetary body in our solar system. 1,321 Earths can fit into Jupiter.
How about our Sun? One thousand Jupiters can fit into the Sun. If you stuff the Sun with multiple clones of our home planet, it will take 960,000 Earths to fill the Sun.
But the Sun is really small!
The largest star in the Milky Way Galaxy is UY Scuti. You can pack 3.69 billion Suns inside this monster supergiant. If we relocated UY Scuti to our solar system, replacing the Sun, its radius would reach the orbit of Saturn or 930 million miles.
But UY Scuti is really small.
You may recall from high school physics that light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Light can zip around the earth 7.5 times in one second. In a single year, light travels 5.88 trillion miles. That’s a lightyear.
The Milky Way Galaxy has at least 100 billion stars. It takes 100,000 lightyears for light to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other.
But the Milky Way is really small.
It is part of what’s called the “Local Group,” which consists of 54 galaxies. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are the largest and most prominent. It takes light 10 million years to travel the diameter of the Local Group.
But the Local Group is really small.
The Local Group is part of the Virgo Super Cluster, which has more than one million galaxies. It takes light 110 million years to travel across the Virgo Super Cluster.
But the Virgo Super Cluster is really small.
That’s because there are an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe. It would take light 92 billion years to cross a static universe, but light could never reach its destination — the other side — because the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. (Yes, Dr. Einstein, your “cosmic speed limit” has been broken by faster-than-light expansion of the universe.)
But our universe is really small.
Scientists conclude that all the visible matter in galaxies does not provide enough gravity to hold them together. Stars should fling away as if water drops from a rotating bicycle tire. Why this doesn’t happen is because of dark matter — strange stuff that exerts a strong gravitational influence but we cannot see or measure yet. Some esteemed theoretical physicists believe that there is what’s called a “multiverse” or multiple universes to explain the structure of our own universe. Dark matter may migrate from nearby universes and add gravity to our universe, gluing together the galaxies, stars and planets.
When we consider how small we are in the big scheme of things, we also can contemplate our size in relationship to time. Neil deGrasse Tyson, an eminent astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, conveys our smallness in time by putting the entire history of our universe into the context of a single calendar year, the “cosmic calendar.”
The Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago. Our universe began with a mighty explosion less than a picosecond after midnight on January 1st, and it was really small — about one-trillionth the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The oldest rocks on earth formed on September 6th. December 18th introduced the first vertebrates. Hominids, our biological ancestors, did not make the scene until December 31st at 8:00 PM. On the cosmic calendar, all recorded human history, all our arts, stories, science, and technologies — the entire history of progress — has occurred in the final three seconds. World War II ended just two-tenths (.02) of one second ago.
These observations about the dimensions of space and time can trivialize the existence of human beings, leading to a difficult question: What is the purpose of human life?
We serve one purpose as unenthusiastic hosts to face mites, each of which lives for about two weeks. During a typical human lifetime, an eyebrow can become homestead to hundreds of generations of body oil-swilling, nocturnal-partying mites. But this seems a bit restrictive.
Each of us is made up of 37.2 trillion cells, more cells than there are galaxies in the universe by a factor of 37,200.
And consider our brains. At three pounds they are really small compared to our body weight — about two percent. Our brains consist of somewhere between 86 and 100 billion neurons. Thus, we have almost as many neurons in our brains as there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and the number of galaxies in the universe.
Our collective brain power has been capable within a span of one second of the cosmic calendar to understand a lot about the universe around us and create amazing technologies such as screaming-fast digital computers, the Internet, DNA sequencing, the James Webb Telescope, and smart phones. Our species has traveled to the moon and returned home safely, and through our celestial robots, humans have escaped the boundaries of the solar system.
Our species is gaining knowledge at exponential rates. This century will not involve 100 years of progress; relative to all human history, the 21st century will include more than 20,000 years of progress. We are creating, learning, and inventing more than at any time in human history.
Perhaps one purpose of human life is to figure out how the universe works. As we gain understanding of the universe and create myriad technological inventions, the universe becomes more complex. As the universe becomes more complex, we defy the second law of thermodynamics, which states that all systems, including marauding face mites, eventually decline into disorder. We are how the universe understands itself, which brings greater order to the universe through intelligence, knowledge, creativity, and invention.
I, for one, am humbled before the forces and dimensions of Nature. They are elemental, transcending the substances that have created me. The chemical elements composing my right arm — oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur — exist as a result of supernova explosions five billion years ago. Your left leg is stardust on fire. Being consciously small and aware and astounded is one source of grace.
Andre Malraux, (1901–1976), one of 107 billion humans who has ever lived, observed: “The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.” (or smallness)
My cousin was not accurate in his understanding of the stars because they, too, are mortal — destined eventually to flicker out and become frozen in the deep, unending well of space. But he had a profound grasp of the infinitesimal.
“You always have been and you always will be,” he assured me.
“How could that be?” I said.
“You are made of star stuff and to star stuff you will return,” he promised.
When you think about all that I’ve written — the extraordinary cosmic knowledge that has been accumulated during the last few seconds of the cosmic calendar — perhaps you can agree that we’re relatively tall after all.
