Humbling Hubble

There are many things in life that are humbling, watching the paralympics, listening to a great piece of music, climbing an Egyptian pyramid etc. but when I think about some of the big questions nothing could be more humbling than to better understand our place and significance in the universe we live in.

The latest deep field picture from the Hubble telescope illustrates this position very well. Actually it's not one picture it's 2000 pictures (all stitched together) of a minute patch of space (the little square next to the Moon) taken with a really long exposure in order to capture as much of the light as possible emanating from unimaginably distant objects. As you can see the little patch of space that, to the naked eye, looks utterly black and empty is crammed full of entire galaxies. Now, a galaxy is a collection of a billion or more stars, we live in a spiral galaxy called the milky way which itself has over a billion stars (like our Sun) in it and is so big that it takes light 100,000 years to get from one side to the other and light is no slouch! The number of stars visible in this one little square of space is simply mind boggling and each star is likely to have planets orbiting around it, so the number of possible places where life could possibly have evolved is boggling times 10.

I always think about this image when I hear about fellow primates getting over excited about who "owns" some little patch of land for an insignificant sliver of time somewhere on our insignificant planet. A small strip of semi-arid scrub at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean or some tiny Island in the middle of the East China Sea to name but two of many examples, in the words of a wise man, “The fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”