Today, we saw the first photo from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope that shows thousands of galaxies (as they existed shortly after the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago, and some as they existed shortly before the formation of Earth around 4.6 billion years ago) in a small part of the Universe that the telescope was pointed in, a kind of an upgrade to the equally mind-blowing Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field image taken between September 2003 to January 2004, and then asked Google a series of questions with Baba bear. We learnt:
- There are 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies in the known Universe.
- There are probably 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or maybe even 100 times that) stars in the known Universe (just the Milky Way, our galaxy, has 100,000,000,000).
- About 4% of these stars are within 0.7 to 1.3 solar mass, of which about 22% are surrounded by planets in the habitable area (the Goldilocks Zone), which makes Earth one of 1,700,600,000,000,000,000,000 possible planets with life, which means there are 235 planets per grain of sand on Earth (which has 7,500,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand, as per a rough calculation). (Note: We shouldn’t worry about precision here, since estimates vary, but our human minds are too limited to imagine these numbers and an error factor of even 10 wouldn’t help us understand it better either way!)
- On this Earth, our planet, only 29% is land, of which 71% is habitable, of which only 1% is built-up, urban area, inside which there is a city called Pune in the state of Maharashtra in the country of India in the continent of Asia, within which there is a small local area, in which there exists a building complex, made up of buildings indicated by letters of the alphabet, in which in a building, on a particular floor, there are 4 flats, of which we reside in one.
- And of the 117,000,000,000 humans that have lived over the past 190,000 years, we, Baba bear and Baby bear, are just two looking up at the sky from this balcony in this apartment in this building in this complex in this locality in this city in this state in this country in this continent on this planet revolving around this Sun in this galaxy on 12 July 2022, a date as random as our continent, country, city, locality, building, and apartment name or number!
How fascinating!
(Note: This ties neatly into and draws from what we are reading nowadays, Yuval Noah Harari’s illustrated book, ‘Sapiens’.)
The point of the matter is that we could see this as proof of how special we are or how small we are. Baba bear told us that how we see this defines how we live our lives. He told us, that there is no right or wrong way to look at this and in fact, we could see it one way in a particular situation and another in some other. He said this is called ‘perspective‘ and it changes depending on the ‘context’. He also said something about ‘frames of reference’ which went totally above our little head. Maybe we’ll get it when we are older.
For now, though, we think that cloud there in the sky looks like Peppa Pig, and we wonder if Peppa and Daddy Pig are also looking at the sky and she thinks there’s a cloud that looks like a human.
