Insignificant

Insignificant can be defined as “too small or unimportant to be worth consideration; of no consequence, influence, or distinction;” and, based upon this definition, I am sure many of you, including myself, have felt this way from time-to-time, especially on vacation at a beach on the East/West coasts and are mesmerized by the continual, relentless onslaught of the waves crashing into and veraciously slapping the shoreline.  Oftentimes, we might sit there and ponder our insignificant presence on this earth or in this universe and wonder as to our purpose… while others, not so philosophical simply enjoy the waves, get too much sun and drink too much alcohol.

So, how big is this universe anyway?

To try imagining how big, place a penny down in front of you. If our sun were the size of that penny, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be 350 miles away. Depending on where you live, that’s very likely in the next state.

Attempting to imagine distances larger than this quickly becomes troublesome. At this scale, the Milky Way galaxy would be 7.5 million miles across, or more than 30 times the distance between the Earth and the moon.

No one knows exactly how large the universe is. It could be infinite or it could have an edge, meaning that traveling for long enough in one direction will bring you back to where you started, like traveling on the surface of a sphere.

Scientists argue over the exact shape and size of the universe but they can calculate one thing with good precision: how far away we can see. Light travels at a specific speed, which is 299,792,458 metres per second, or about 186,282 miles per second.  This means we can see 13.7 light years away…  but even this is rather misleading because the strange thing about space is that it’s expanding; and, this fact brought to us by the Hubble Telescope begs another question:

What is space expanding into?

But, let’s return to my opening statement about insignificance.  In this overwhelmingly huge universe, we find mankind, then mankind must by default be pretty damn special and unique.  And…  even if, we found another million types of mankind out there in our vast universe, mankind would still be pretty damn special and unique.

So far,

we know of only one mankind… 

and, this mankind

is far from being insignificant.