Number of stars in the Universe:
Imagine that we are sitting in a circle and we wish to model the number of stars in the universe.
I pour a thimbleful of sand in the middle of our circle. This represents the number of stars we typically see on a clear night away from city lights. Look at this little pile of grains of sand… Remember the stars you typically see in the sky from where you live…
Now we want to represent the number of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. I would need a truckload of sand, dumped in our midst. A truckload… That’s a lot of sand… and each grain of sand represents a star. And that’s only our Milky Way…
Next, we want to represent the number of stars in the universe. We would need a freight-car load dumped here every second, night and day, for three years!
Try to grasp the magnitude… Each grain of sand is a star… Freight-car after freight-car…
A hundred billion galaxies in the universe, each with a hundred billion stars… (And the latest conclusion from astronomers is that that figure may be low by a factor of 10!) Watch this video clip:
It was long believed that the only star with a solar system of planets revolving around it was our own Sun. In the past decade, astronomers have developed techniques that have uncovered hundreds, then thousands of stars with planets revolving around them. Planetary systems might be the rule, not the exception. If only a tiny fraction of these stars have planetary systems and if only a tiny fraction of these planets could support life as we know it, there could theoretically still be hundreds of thousands of worlds with self-sentient (thinking, self-aware) life-forms…
But they will all be so far away that it is probable that we will never encounter any other recognizable sentient life-form…
Meditation:
That’s a lot to ponder… Just imagine ourselves, on this tiny sphere, living in the midst of this vast universe, much of it probably quite hostile to life as we know it… Or perhaps we live in a universe full of self-sentient beings, scattered among these billions of billions of stars… Are human beings just an accident in this vast universe? Or is self-sentience – the ability to be aware of being aware – a natural outcome of evolution, whether here on earth or elsewhere in the universe? What would it do to our understanding of ourselves if we discovered that, indeed, there were other forms of advanced self-sentience in the Universe? On the other hand, what does it say about the universe and us if we are indeed the only self-sentient species in this vast universe?
What are your feelings when you reflect upon this? What touches you most? Where do you experience the greatest “block” or challenge around this material?