Most of space is just space. I guess this is why most maps of the solar system arent drawn to scale. Its not hard to draw the planets. Its the empty space thats a problem. Most space charts leave out the most significant part – all the space. Were used to dealing with things at a much smaller scale than this. When it comes to things like the age of the earth, the number of snowflakes in Siberia, the national debt... Those things are too much for our brains to handle. We need to reduce things down to something we can see or experience directly in order to understand them. Were always trying to come up with metaphors for big numbers. Even so, they never seem to work. Even though we dont really understand them, a lot can happen within these massive lengths of time and space. A drop of water can carve out a canyon. An amoeba can become a dolphin. A star can collapse on itself. Its easy to disregard nothingness because theres no thought available to encapsulate it. Theres no metaphor that fits because, by definition, once the nothingness becomes tangible, it ceases to exist. Its a good thing we have these tiny stars and planets, otherwise wed have no point of reference at all. Wed be surrounded by this stuff that our minds werent built to understand. All this emptiness really could drive you nuts. For instance, if youre in a sensory deprivation tank for too long, your brain starts to make things up. You see and hear things that arent there. The brain isnt built to handle empty. Sorry, Humanity, says Evolution. What with all the jaguars trying to eat you, the parasites in your fur, and the never-ending need for a decent steak, I was a little busy. I didnt exactly have time to come up with a way to conceive of vast stretches of nothingness. Neurologically speaking, we really only deal with matter of a certain size, and energy of a few select wavelengths. For everything else, we have to make up mental models and see if they match up to the tiny shreds of hard evidence that actually feel real. The mental models provided by mathematics are extremely helpful when trying to make sense of these vast distances, but still... Abstraction is pretty unsatisfying. When you hear people talk about how, theres more to this universe than our minds can conceive of its usually a way to get you to go along with a half-baked plot point about UFOs or super-powers in a sci-fi series that youre watching late at night when you cant get to sleep. Even when Shakespeare wrote: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” – hes basically trying to give us a loophole to make the ghost in the story more believable. But all this empty space, these things of a massive scale, really are more than our minds can conceive of. The maps and metaphors fail to do them justice. You look at one tiny dot, then you look for the next tiny dot. Everything in between is inconsequential and fairly boring. Emptiness is actually everywhere. Its something like 99.9999999999999999999958% of the known universe. Even an atom is mostly empty space. Some theories say all this emptiness is actually full of energy or dark matter and that nothing can truly be empty... but come on, only ordinary matter has any meaning for us. You could safely say the universe is a whole lotta nothing. If so much of the universe is made up of emptiness, what does that mean to people like us, living on a tiny speck in the middle of all of it? Is the known universe 99.9999999999999999999958% empty? Or is it 0.0000000000000000000042% full? With so much emptiness, arent stars, planets, and people just glitches in an otherwise elegant and uniform nothingness, like pieces of lint on a black sweater? But without the tiny dots for it to stretch between, there would be no emptiness to measure, and for that matter, no one around to measure it. You might say that so much emptiness makes the tiny bits of matter that much more meaningful - simply by the fact that, against all odds, they arent empty. If youre drowning in the middle of the ocean, a floating piece of driftwood is a pretty big deal. What if trillions of stars and planets were crammed right next to each other? They wouldnt be special at all. It seems like we are both pathetically insignificant, and miraculously important at the same time. Whether you more strongly feel the monumental significance of tiny things or the massive void between them depends on who you are, and how your brain chemistry is balanced at a particular moment. We walk around with miniature, emotional versions of the universe inside of us. Its reassuring to know that no matter how depressingly bleak or ridiculously momentous we feel, the universe, judging by its current structure, seems well aware of both extremes. The fact that youre here, in the midst of all this nothing, is pretty amazing when you stop and think about it.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 01:08:27 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015