In awe of our universe
Virender Kapoor
‘Even these stars, which seem so numerous, are as sand, as dust — or less than dust — in the enormity of the space in which there is nothing.’
Carl Sagan
Many of us think that we have achieved so much in life; we are so rich, so powerful, own several palatial homes, flats and are so mighty that we can employ thousands of people who are at our command. Someone is a billionaire, someone owns airlines, another one is the President of the most powerful democracy and yet another one is a general of the army, commanding a million strong force. With these achievements most people become arrogant and acquire a big ego. They consider others as nothing or even dirt in front of them. Unfortunately they feel they are the biggest, mightiest and all important human beings and are under the impression that they can do anything they want. Some people feel that their father is a big shot, he can do anything and he can get anything he wants. This arrogance is because of personal achievements.
Another way of looking at our might as human beings is to look at the tremendous progress made by mankind in the last 5000 years. We know that these achievements are really big. We have built huge building, skyscrapers, Dams, highways, aircraft, railways, tanks, submarines, rockets and ships. But in reality where do we stand in respect of our own earth and the entire universe? It is worth viewing it in two segments, first our earth itself and then look up and look at the whole universe.
Let us take a macro view of our earth where we live. The might of the mother earth itself is mind boggling. It weighs 6,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 Kgs with a radius of 6371 Kms and is 150 million Kms from the sun. Has anyone seen every square meters of the earth? The answer is no because it is so huge. Has anyone seen all the cities in the world? Answer again is no. There are 230,000 species of underwater creatures. The number of types of plants is 400,000 and still counting. We are more than 7.5 billion people living on this planet. Some are white, some black, some yellow and some brown. No two people have the same finger prints! We don’t even know more than say five thousand people on our own planet. Our oceans have 326 million cubic miles of water. These figures are mind boggling and therefore what are few hundred acres of land or twenty villas that a person owns in comparison to this. The answer is that it is insignificant and negligible.
If you look at the world map, you can see India and you can see a city like Delhi but if you try to identify your house it is not possible unless you use Google maps created by pictures taken from Satellites.
Let us say you have a sprawling mansion in Delhi which stands on a grand ten acres of land. This translates to 40000 square meters. Do you know that are of Delhi is 1.484 billion m². Now where does you palatial home figure in this? Ok, now look at a bigger picture. Hold your breath…Area of our country is 3.287 trillion m². Now can you understand where you stand in front of the city and the country you live in?
This information is very humbling and tells us that in front of nature, our earth, jungles, rivers and oceans we have very little power and we are very tiny in stature as far as our planet is concerned.
We have had a brief overview of the expanse of our earth. Now let us look at still bigger a picture, which will make you feel that as human beings we are not even a small spec. A human being has a life span of say hundred years! When we meet some friend after say ten years, we exclaim ‘Oh my god we are meeting after ages’! Did you know that the universe as per some estimates, according to research, is approximately 13.8 billion years old? It is even ridiculous to compare the age of a man to the age of the universe.
The Earth is a little over 4.5 billion years old. The history of life on Earth began about 3.8 billion years ago, initially with bacteria. The first dinosaurs appeared between 243,000,000 and 231,000,000 years ago! Dinosaurs died out around 66 million (66,000,000) years ago.
Don’t you think this puts things in perspective and makes us realize that on our planet earth our life is just transitory in nature our hundred years is just a blip in the billions of years of earth’s existence. Let us understand that whatever we achieve, its good but looking at the larger picture sanity must prevail on us and let us see the reality, where we actually stand as individuals with in such a mighty nature.
As Carl Sagan said ‘It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling and, I might add, a character-building experience.’
In the next article we will move on to the areas outside of our earth which itself is so big . This will give us a much bigger picture of god’s creation and we are a part of it!
Call it universe call it cosmos or call it Srishti, they all represent the unfathomable space which appears to have no beginning and no end. Where does this space end? Can we imagine, yes we may be able to just imagine. Let us assume it ends somewhere, then what is after that? You can’t even guess!
We should look at these intriguing and fascinating facts about our universe in relation to our own achievements and activities.
