A lot of things are going wrong right now. Every day something else seems to fall apart. I'm not here to give commentary on that. I'm here to tell you about the solar system.
The universe is big -- really big. And it's growing. Infinitely. Let that sink in for a second. The biggest thing...in existence...is growing...at an infinite rate.
Our planet can feel so small sometimes. Tragic events seem to bring it closer together, but Earth is still huge. There are seven billion people on the planet, and that number is growing. That number will continue to grow. You, as an individual, make up an incredibly small percentage of population. So small that it hardly feels as though it should count as a number at all. The likelihood that your parents met? Very small. Likelihood that the combination of genes that resulted in you came to be? Very, very small.
A little more than one million Earths can fit in the sun. VY Canis Majoris, the largest known star, could fit 6.8 billion copies of our sun in itself. Maybe that'll look more impressive as numbers: 6,800,000,000 suns. There are several hundred billion stars forming our galaxy. And that's just our galaxy. There are a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. I cannot possibly articulate how massive that is.
Numbers can be hard to comprehend. It is very hard to imagine anything bigger than ourselves. Something so large, so out of our reach. Something so unconquerable, something that does not need us. Grasping people is hard -- grasping how many of our our planets could fit into the largest known star is borderline impossible.
I am not saying these things to scare you. I am not sharing facts in hopes of inducing anxiety and existential crises. I am sharing this because I think perspective is important. We are small, so very small. We cannot control everything. There are many forces in the universe that could not care less about us, and yet, we are here.
So many things could have gone wrong -- so many things have gone wrong -- and you're still here. In the balance of the planets, in the alignment of every system, if anything was even a centimeter off, it could've collapsed, but it didn't. Whether you believe in a divine power or a stroke of what couldn't be anything less than pure luck, you are alive right now. Make that count for something. You could let these facts scare you into thinking that your life is meaningless because you don't get to change everything in existence, or you could let it remind you how lucky you are to be alive. The odds were against you, and here you are before me, at this time, in this place. Let that mean something. You're here.
