Perspectives

I recently saw some presentation trying to impress me with the size of the universe. You know, one of those things that say that you are just a little dot compared to the entire earth, which is just a little dot compared to the Sun, which is just a little dot compared to the stars Betelgeuse (the name is a typo from يد الجوزاء) or Antares (Αντάρης).

However...

Size is not all that matters. The most complex known object in the universe is your brain. Or mine of course. Even my little bird brain is more complex than a planet like Jupiter. Jupiter has a certain interest to us, as there is so much of it so close to us, but it is all brawn and definitely no complex brain in it. It is all big boring mass.

And if Antares tries to brag with its size, that is not really convincing, as it easily would fit inside our solar system, inside Jupiter's orbit.

The really big things in the universe are the holes between the things - not the things themselves. And empty holes are really boring. A hole where you can hide your house key may be interesting, but holes that are light-years across are just mind-bogglingly and utterly boring. Unless you have a lot of house keys.

Not even the size of emptiness is particularly impressive. Without a telescope, you can see things that are 3 million light years away, and what one can see is a distance one can grasp.

To get to the full size of the big and boring universe, one only has to go another 3000 times that distance. In other words, if you each day travelled as far as one can see, you would not need more than ten years to cross the universe. And you would probably not see anything particularly interesting along the way.

With that perspective, I think things like Japanese adjectives or the social relations among bonobos are much more interesting.