HUGE
This is a response to my next door neighbor, Don Collins, who built an observatory In his back yard which houses a powerful telescope hooked to a computer which allows him to explore the universe on clear nights. Once a week Don posts a Physics Photo of the Week of some scientific phenomenom, either here on earth or at the end of the universe which he then explains to people like me who have little idea how the physical world functions. This week he put on a photograph of a star cluster 20,000 light years away that has hundreds of thousands of stars packed densely together whizzing around. If our solar system were in the middle of all of this it would be torn apart by random stars flying by.
All that sounds very matter of fact in Don‘s telling. But every time I read one of his posts the enormity of the universe and the minuscule place of our earth in it floors me. 20,000 light years away with light traveling at 186,000 miles a second seems awfully far away, hundreds of thousands of stars in a cluster with the big ones exploding into supernovae and then reforming as stars again over eons of time is too much for me to comprehend. The enormous universe continues over eons of time to play out while off in one corner is our little planet our lives flick past in the blink of an eye. None of this seems to phase Don very much but it knocks me out, as much of the tiniest of processes taking place in our invisible cells, the subject of The Tangled Tree that I am reading, that is also beyond my comprehension.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 