NORTHERN PLANNER

Knowing our place in the universe dents your confidence a bit. Ever since we proved that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around our place in the universe has seemed more and more marginal.

We’re on a spec of rock and metal, orbiting an ordinary star on the outskirts of a galaxy that has about 400 billion stars in a universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies. That’s before you consider the possibilty of an infinity of dimensions. Our existence is pretty irrlevant.

But when you talk about existence, you get in trouble, existence only applies to things on your relative scale. An atom in a bogey in your nose doesn’t know it’s in a nose, a bogey or even know it’s an atom. Outside it’s nucleus , the strong atomic force is meaningless, while inside an atom it’s everything and gravity doesn’t matter until you get to the tiniest distances possible.

On the very smallest scale, electrons do not exist, they are not a solid thing but a cloud of probability – since they may be here, here, or here, we have to assume they are in all those places at the same time.

In the same way, do we exist on the scale of a universe? We are invisible next to something that big, to it, are we really there? Maybe trying to understand the meaning of the universe is like a bacterium wondering about the meaning of the human gut it lives in.

Don’t know where to go to this, but I like the thought of your truths being grounded in your individual perspective. Just thinking out load, so I’ll stop.