Man in a Cosmic Context

According to the bible, "the meek shall inherit the earth" - oh, and the entire
universe because god created everything including all of the estimated 1,000,000
,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars and associated planets and moons in it (scientist
s have suggested three major planets per star as a conservative educated guess)
just for us - A universe as much as 92 billion light years across that has exist
ed for around 14 billion years (the apparent disparity between those two figures
is explained later, stick with it). All of this for a species who has only been
infesting this planet for about 1.5 million years in a form recognisable as a m
odern hominid, and who lives on a rock 12,742 km in diameter. Let's put that int
o context with an easy to comprehend analogy:
Proctor and Hamilton provided an interesting way of visualising our relative imp
ortance in the scheme of things. If the history of the universe is compressed in
to a week - the time god allegedly took to create it 8000 years ago (to use the
highest biblical literalist estimate of creation being 6000 years prior to the c
rucifixion) - this is how it would look:
Big Bang: Sunday midnight.
First Atoms form: Sunday 12:01:00a.m.
Stars and Galaxies form: Sunday 3:20:00a.m.
Our Sun is born: Thursday 4:00:00p.m.
Earth born: Thursday 8:30:00p.m.
Moon formed: Thursday 9:40:00p.m.
Earliest life on Earth: Friday 5:30:00a.m.
First multi-cellular life on Earth: Saturday 4:10:00p.m.
Dinosaurs appear: Saturday 9:50:00p.m.
Dinosaurs die: Saturday 11:20:00p.m.
Humans arise: Saturday 11:59:35p.m.
Humans migrate Asia - America: Saturday 11:59:59p.m.
Present Day: next Sunday midnight
Sun becomes Red Giant: next Tuesday 8:00:00a.m.
Sun becomes White Dwarf: next Tuesday 10:10am
Just to be clear 11:59:59 doesn't represent 1492 and the discovery of America by
the Europeans, but the actual first early hominids to migrate via a land or ice
bridge from Asia to America some 16,000 years ago. That means that a European f
irst set foot on American soil just 1/10 of a second before midnight, even if yo
u take into account the possible pre Colombian European discovery of the contine
nt.
Now, here comes the science bit: anyone scared of math should just skip to the n
umbers at the end. Everyone else can thank the back of a carton of 200 Davidoff
cigarettes, a Dunhill torpedo pen, the excellent new HD calculator for iPad and
http://www.easysurf.cc/scintd.htm that converts notation to seemingly limitless
decimals and back again. For the sake of these calculations I have used the shor
t form American billion of 1,000,000,000 kilometres, and the usual mathematical
notation (*= multiplied by, /= divided by, ^= to the power of, therefore ^3= cub
ed, km= kilometres, ly= light years. Pi is calculated to 15 decimal places i.e.
3.14159265358979 for all equations.)
Current theories suggest that whilst the logical method to calculate the diamete
r of the universe in light years (ly) would be to double the 14 billion years in
which it has most likely been in existence, the actual figure due to various th
eories regarding it's early faster than light expansion (too complicated to go i
nto here) suggest a deeply possible diameter of anything up to 92 billion light
years - maybe even more. A light year is 9,460,800,000,000 km, therefore the app
roximate diameter is 8.703936*10^23 km or 870,393,600,000,000,000,000,040 km. We
need half that figure, 46*10^9 ly to give us the radius for the next bit.
Let's assume that the universe is spherical, space is flat, and that we are only
acknowledging the three key observable dimensions (time has stopped especially
for us just so we don't have to change these equations to allow for continued ex
pansion or start messing with the other seven intangible dimensions). Therefore
we need to apply the formula of 4/3 Pi*(r)^3 to calculate the volume of a sphere
thus - 4/3 pi*(46*10^9 ly)^3 = 4.07*10^32 ly^3
Using the same formula we can similarly calculate that the volume of the Earth f
rom the widely accepted average diameter of 12,742 km is 1.08321*10^12 km^3, and
we know that 1 km^3 is equal to 1.181*10^-39 ly^3. Therefore the volume of the
earth in cubic light years would be:
1.08321*10^12 km^3 * 1.181*10^-39 km^3 = 1.279*10^-27 ly^3
If we now divide the volume of the universe, by that of the earth we can work ou
t how many times our planet could fit within it.
4.07 * 10^32 ly^3 / 1.279 *10^-27 ly^3 = 3.18*10^59
Once you turn the resultant fraction into a percentage by dividing 100 by our re
sult, then you have 3.1446544e-58 or:
0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003144654%
....which is the total percentage of the universe occupied by earth.
Given that the current population of the planet is around 7billion people, that
means that if you're sick of your neighbours, then just divide up the universe e
qually and everyone gets:
549,999,999,999,999,936,464,440,248,728,136,152 km^3
Theists will argue that many of these wider figures are inaccurate, and they wou
ld be right. Most of these figures are increasingly looking like conservative es
timates as our understanding of the universe becomes more advanced. Even at thes
e levels, next time you go to the beach, pick up one single grain of sand: in it
's context with every other grain of sand in every desert, every sea bed, every
other beach, every quarry, etc. then it shares the same relationship as our sun
does with every other star, with one small exception: At this scale, with the su
n being a 2mm wide grain of sand rather than the 1,380,000 km diameter it actual
ly is, then that gives us a working scale of 1:1.5x10^-12, making one light year
equal 14.2 km. The distance between our grain of sand sized sun and it's neares
t neighbour Alpha Centauri (4.37 ly) would be 62km, slightly less than the diame
ter of the M25 motorway which encompasses London England. The earth? Given that
we are only the equivalent of 8.3 light MINUTES away from our sun, then that wou
ld make us a speck of dust 983mm from our grain of sand. If we then made that sa
me grain of sand represent our entire solar system, the Milky Way galaxy of whic
h it is a part would be approximately 13 to 18 miles across. Andromeda, our near
est neighboring galaxy, would be approximately 300 miles away. Makes you think d
oesn't it?
Cal Sorrows 2010
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