Huge Perspective

Are some things literally unimaginable? Can it be that some things are so deep, or so huge, that the human brain just fails to get a realistic perspective on them? I think there are such things, like the immeasurable hugeness of space and time.

_{Image by skeeze - source: Pixabay}

The human mind is an amazing thing. While wondering about the miraculousness of life and the grandiose nature of the cosmos, I often catch myself being perplexed by our minds ability to wonder about those things at all. What compelled the universe to assemble, over huge amounts of time, in us the perfect composition of atoms and forces, so that we can ask questions about the origin and nature of that very universe? Is there a reason at all for consciousness to exist? These are grand questions asked by tiny creatures in a grand universe; our minds must truly be limitless to be able to contain such grand a concept as "the universe"... Or are they?

Space and time are unified in Einsteins theories of relativity, but I think there's another way for us humans to get a feel for their connectivity, and that is our tendency to use distance in order to get perspective on large periods of time: when visualizing the history of human evolution, for example, we often draw a timeline, with the centimeters corresponding to millions, thousands or hundreds of years. Or we say things like: "if the time from the creation of earth to now was a kilometer long, humans have only existed for a few centimeters". Or we bring it back to the size of a 24 hour clock, and say humans have existed for a few minutes, or something like that. We only live a lifetime, so our brains are suited to deal with decades at most, and we can sort of imagine time-spans of hundreds of years through our ancestors and history books, but we start to lose perspective when the numbers get bigger. Did you know that Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the I-Pad than to the building of the first pyramids? Well, you probably did know, but still this realization is kind of startling, at least it was for me when I saw the video on the hugeness of deep time, linked below.

_{The Impossible Hugeness of Deep Time}

Getting perspective on space and time, or space-time, also means that we realize how terribly slow light is. Yep, you read that right: light-speed is but a crawl. Photons are the proverbial snails in space. Really. Approximately 300,000 kilometers per second sounds so amazingly fast to us, that it makes us lose perspective on the hugeness of space. It takes light more than eight minutes to travel from the surface of the sun to our planet. It takes light 4.22 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us. And there's an estimated 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone...

To get a sense of how slow light really is, to sort of experience it yourself, watch the video at the end of this post. It's a real-time journey at light-speed, starting at the sun and traversing our solar system. This thing is 45 minutes long, and in that time the photon we're riding with hasn't even reached Saturn yet. When I found this video a while ago, I found it very effective, for myself, to relax and empty my mind a bit, but I shut it off after reaching earth; I'm too impatient or, more likely, light is just too damn slow ;-)

_{Riding Light - Traversing the Solar System at the speed of light}

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