I Am Not a Big Deal
At the age of 54 I consider myself to be one of the fortunate few to still have both of my parents alive and active. It’s a pleasure to speak with both of my parents on almost a daily basis regarding nearly every topic under the sun. We’ll speak about things ranging from politics, spirituality, society, to science. The other day I was talking to my dad and we got on the topic of a Sunday school lesson he had that brought up the amount of people who have lived on the earth. After some discussion and research we reached the estimation that about 100 billion people (100,000,000,000) have come and gone. Our conversation evolved into discussing the vastness of the universe, trying to get the smallest understanding of just how big it is.
If a star or celestial object is 13.6 billion light-years away, that object could be gone or “extinguished” and we wouldn’t immediately know it—since the light we see from that object is technically an image from the past. It’s amazing to think that the stars you see at night are light that has traveled thousands of millions of light-years. Trying to understand the process explained to us that light travels at 186,000 miles per second. That’s 11,160,000 miles per minute, 669,600,000 miles per hour. My dad is a brilliant man, always trying to find out as much as he can about these things, so I’ll give him credit for these numbers. If there are 2 Trillion galaxies in the universe, and each universe has an average of 1 billion stars, then that means there are relatively a sextillion (2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars shining out there. Other estimates put those numbers at even greater reaches, with about 10 trillion galaxies, each containing an estimated 100 billion stars per galaxy, totaling (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). If you live in the northern or southern U.S., it’s estimated you are exposed to the light of about 4,000 stars, but the human eye can see only about 2,000 of them. That is a paltry number in comparison to the total amount of stars out there; that means we can either see 0.000,000,000,000,000,01 percent of all stars or 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,2 percent of all stars.
Let’s make this personal, in a universe so great and vast, you’re going to be the only you that has and will ever exist. To draw even greater perspective, if we take the average of 100,000,000,000 stars per galaxy and the average of 6 planets per solar system, that equals roughly 6,000,000,000,000 planets per solar system, and I won’t bore you with the moons. The fact that your collection of carbon and other elements exists, consciously here on this earth is incredible. Just think about that in the overall scheme of that. It’s so hard for our minds to wrap around that. It’s impossible to believe there’s no God when those odds of you existing are so small in a universe so huge, when everything is perfectly orchestrated. Now, you’re 1/100,000,000,000, and that may not make you that big of a deal, there will only ever be one of you. And the fact that you are so minute in this overall vastness, you are still a big deal to God, who made you in his own image.
