When your girl tells you “I need some space,” she does not mean that you guys should stop seeing each other.

She means that she wants some space.

Space as in the type of stuff NASA and Star Wars fanatics love. Space as in stars, galaxies, and aliens!

“Astronomy compels the soul to look upward, and leads us from this world to another.” – Plato. There is a simple beauty in looking up at the night sky. Looking into the heavens, we are seeing things we will never be able to touch. The light from millions of stars turn a black vacuum into something our dreams can grasp.

Our society is infatuated with space right now as we race for Mars, one of our celestial neighboring planets. We love to think of ways to travel between galaxies and imagine aliens who can travel through time. Some people love space for its unfathomable potential for our future. Others love space simply for its emptiness and silence. Your girl probably loves space because you aren’t in it.

Space is beyond our comprehension in terms of size. In science, we look at the Big Bang as the beginning of the universe. Our visible universe is a mere 92 billion light-years in diameter, which is about 6 trillion miles. The visible universe, aka the universe we can observe, is 552 billion trillion miles across. That is only what we can see!

When you look up into the night sky on a clear night away from city lights, you see thousands and thousands of stars. Something your girl might not know is that we can only see one other galaxy. Hi! my name is Andromeda. The Andromeda galaxy is usually just thought of as a fuzzy looking star, but it is 100 billion stars worth of light taking 2.5 million light years to reach us. More than 99% of the stars we can see without a telescope belong to our own galaxy.

The emptiness of space probably scares your girl every time she thinks about it. Our universe is gigantic. Only 4% of our universe turns out to be stars and planets, while the other 96% is composed of a vacuum. Now the vacuum of space is what makes space truly amazing.

The vacuum is nothingness. It is a low pressure, zero matter space that does not affect any physical processes taking place within it. Just how empty is space in comparison to the vacuum?

Our universe is 92 billion light years in across. We can estimate that the universe contains around 10^53 kg of matter. By converting some stuff to meters and doing a little arithmetic, we can estimate the density of our entire universe to be 0.37 x 10^-27 kg/m^3. What exactly does that mean? If we turned everything into hydrogen (6 x 10^26 atoms per kg), then the density of our universe would be about 1/5 of one atom per every cubic meter! 1/5 of a single atom!

If your girl wanted to visualize this a little better, tell her this: 1 cubic meter is roughly 1,500 Starbucks venti cups of coffee. If we spread out the entire universe to everything having the same density; if the universe was perfectly homogenous, then it would take 7,500 venti cups of coffee to find one atom of matter.

Space is so empty, yet it is immense. Looking into space, your girl can see light from stars thousands of light years away. The light that she sees from a star was a light beam moving towards her in space for thousands of light years before she was able to observe it.

The closest star takes four years to send its light towards us. If that star randomly collapsed into a supernova, we would not even know for four years. We are looking into the past when we look up into the night sky. Dr. Who is no longer the only one with a time machine.

We can look up and go back the roaring 20's if we want. We can observe galaxies that were born around the same time as the first stars formed. We can observe the collapse of stars without even knowing another more powerful star formed in its place.

Hopefully, you and your girl will find more time to look up whenever you can now. Every time I look up into the night sky, I am humbled and in complete amazement. I dream of standing on one of the other worlds out there. We do not even understand our own planet.

Looking out into the unknown of the universe makes me wonder if the answers we have are out there. Space is the combination of all the best things. Space is a blend of beauty, excitement, danger, power, hope, and adventure. It calls to every single one of us to do more and be more. It reminds us where we came from. It asks us where we are going.

Tonight, look up into the sky with your girl and dream of what is out there. Admire the emptiness and appreciate God’s beauty in the starlight. That is what your girl wants when she says she just needs some space.