Picture: NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, Oct. 14 2009: "The Pleiades and Stardust"
I've recently been humbled by the realization that were we not specifically created, our existence would be completely insignificant.
I was listening to an old Astro C10 podcast by my university (Woo!!) and the facts are astonishing.
Consider: On the size scale where the sun (which, mind you could fit about 1,000,000 earths for volume) is the size of the period at the end of your sentence, the nearest star would still be nine miles away. The galaxy contains billions of stars. Then when you imagine all of the star systems, galaxies, nebulae, and superclusters you start to see just how small we really are. One wonders that God can even see us, much less be involved or concerned with some moving dirt on a relatively microcopic speck of the universe. (And we're nowhere near being the smallest parts of the universe - there's atoms, and nuclei, quarks, gluons, leptons; maybe strings...so much detail!) Meanwhile, you can also make comparisons on a time scale - the universe is currently estimated to be around 14,000,000,000 (14 billion) years old. The average human life is about 70 years. The ratio there is 0.000000005. (Five nanoseconds, or five billionths of a second.) A human blink is on average about 300 milliseconds (.3 seconds), so, by analogy, if your life was 5 nanoseconds, then just in the time it takes to blink you could live about about 60 million lifetimes. Even if you don't believe that this is the correct age of the universe, you can see my point - everything that we do, every vacation you take, every career you pursue, every generation of a family that lives rises and falls in a ridiculously trivial amount of time. It reminds me of David's prayer - "What is man, that thou art mindful of him, or the Son of Man, that thou visitist him?"
Kind of makes eternity a little more impressive...
