You and I are universes. I’ll explain. The universe of cosmology is made up of stars and planets and gas and black holes and “dark matter” and “dark energy”. It is, as far as we know, governed by four forces: Strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. It is already almost 14 billion years old and no one knows how much longer it will still be around, but it will certainly last billions of years and perhaps much more. The universe, as it is now, is the product of billions of years of change. The universe has a history and is organized in ways that astrophysicists only partially understand. I said “we know”. “We” is astrophysicists and I am not one of the “we”. At the present stage of humanity, knowledge is highly dispersed.
Back to you and me. Compared to the cosmos, a human being is infinitesimally small and of tiny duration. But, a human being is almost infinitely large compared to the atoms of which she is built. Since this is memoir, I’ll use myself as an example but, you are free to substitute yourself for me. My body, including my brain is composed of 30 trillion cells. A single cell may be made up of a hundred trillion atoms. Each cell is highly organized and the living human body is an organized set of diverse cells. You and I are at once almost infinitely small and infinitely large.
Now a digression about large numbers. As part of talking about the universe and talking about humans, I’ve been throwing around big numbers. There are 400 billion stars in our galaxy; there are 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. The human body consists of 30 trillion cells. A cell may be made up of 100 trillion atoms. More mundanely, U.S. Gross National Product is about 20 trillion dollars and wealth held by U.S. individuals is about 100 trillion dollars. 800 Americans are billionaires; they control about 3.4 trillion dollars. Did you ignore these numbers, or is your head spinning?
My father liked the following joke. A lecturer says, “In a billion years the sun will swallow up the earth”. An excited member of the audience gets up and shouts, “What did you say? What did you say” The lecturer repeats, “In a billion years the sun will swallow up the earth”. “Whew”, says the audience member, “I thought you said a million years.”
We all understand small numbers, 5 or 7 or 15. Most of us develop an intuitive understanding of hundreds and thousands. We can picture a 3,000 square foot house or a stack of 20 100 dollar bills, making $2,000. Millions, billions, trillions are much more abstract. We might be able to manipulate the numbers, but we don’t have a good feel for them. I’ll give an example I heard somewhere. We all know about millionaires and we also hear a lot about billionaires. But we are probably not aware how vast the difference is. If you have a million dollars, you can spend $1,000 a day for almost three years before it is gone. If you have a billion dollars you can spend $1,000 a day for almost 3,000 years before it is gone. This gives some sense of the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire. When I say there are billions of stars in a galaxy or trillions of cells in a human body, I might almost as well say “an incomprehensibly large number of x’s.” I could say 109 for billion and 1012 for trillion. This makes calculating easier, but doesn’t make the numbers more intuitive.
I’ll get back to what makes a person a universe in the next entry.
Good blog post, Pop. This reminds me of when your father called to tell you he was dying and he said something like, ‘Don’t worry, don’t be sad. I’ve been alive for 75 years, but I’ll be dead for billions of years!’ Keep blogging. It’s a good distraction from the plague.
Thanks. Actually what my father (Tate) said when he was diagnosed with lung cancer was:”I have news for you, I’m not immortal” The billions of years came later.