An Infinitesimal Existence – Cosmology for the Unscientific Mind
Ted Folkert – December 29, 2017
We often use the term mind-boggling as a casual comment to emphasize something complicated, hard to understand or that seems incomprehensible.
Fasten your seat belts. Here is a mind-boggle for those of us with an unscientific mind.
If there isn’t one, there should be a book entitled “Don’t Know Much About Cosmology.” Think about this information which is discussed by David Filkin and Stephen Hawking in “Stephen Hawking’s Universe:”
Summarizing: The rock we all inhabit, Planet Earth, evolved more than fifteen billion years ago from something smaller than a dot in the universe, which exploded in an event called the Big Bang, which created billions of stars and evolved through gravitation into billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars, one of which is our home, Planet Earth.
That’s right, Earth is one of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of billions of galaxies in the universe.
How is that for mind-boggling? Like my grandfather might have said, put that in your pipe and smoke it.
In other words, if there was a map on your computer screen containing all the stars in the universe, which would be a number with at least eighteen zeroes behind it, a quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, maybe a centillion, with 300 zeroes. The map would be a solid sheet of black after all the stars were noted on the map. So, Planet Earth wouldn’t even be identifiable, it would be lost in a huge mass of billions and billions and billions of dots.
How big would the map have to be to identify our planet? How big to identify our state, our city, our home, each of us seven billion people on this planet. As Bernie Sanders might say, it would have to be HUGE.
How small does that make you feel? Tiny? Infinitesimal? It’s a real ego deflator if there ever was one.
Most of the cosmologists agree to all these facts – facts proven to a considerable degree of confidence in the scientific community through studies by radio-telescope technology and quantum mathematics, generally considered to be irrefutable. Furthermore, they believe that only about ten percent of the universe has been discovered, leaving ninety percent yet to be identified. And they believe that the universe is continuing to expand although at a slower rate which could mean that, at some point, the universe could reverse directions and begin to contract back into that original small dot from whence it came. A frightening thought to say the least.
I didn’t make this up. The information came from Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Erastosthenes, Einstein, Mendelson, Curie, Rutherford,, and many others who spent their lives looking through telescopes and doing mathematical equations.
But don’t go shoot yourself in fear of the planet disappearing. This contraction would happen billions of years from now, so we won’t have to be concerned. After all, we may end up destroying humankind much sooner if we keep going the way we are. Maybe the fact that our existence began with an explosion causes us to be so attracted to explosions that we will make our planet uninhabitable anyway. We seem to be moving in that direction at a rapid pace.
Think about it!