Billions and Billions of Stars

White Dwarfs, Black Holes, Red Giants and Big Bangs

We often say that life is too short but there are species that have a life span of less than one day. Other species, like house flies, are much more fortunate, as they can live up to four weeks. As much as we think that their sole purpose in life is to irritate humans, houseflies do not really care about that. All they want is to eat and breed. Our familiar ants can live to three months and humans live to one hundred years, more or less. But humans are not even close to the top of the lifespan pyramid. Whales and Galapagos tortoises can live up to two hundred years. No one really knows if they spend all that lifetime on artistic, scientific or other intellectual pursuits, and if they find the time to care about morality and religious beliefs. They probably just want to eat and breed and they can keep doing this for two hundred years.

An ant’s viewing range is no more than one meter. So an ant’s perspective reality is only a tiny portion of our human perspective reality. There is no way that an ant will ever know Paris or the Parthenon or Niagara Falls. The ant’s universe is limited to its colony and it is only a tiny fraction of the universe known to humans. But isn’t it likely that the universe that we humans can ever know is also a tiny portion of the entire universe? Isn’t it…