The universe is something so unimaginably immense, so infinitesimally small, and so incredibly strange, that it would be impossible to ever completely wrap one’s mind around it. Trying to, however, is a refreshing practice; whether it awes you to a sense of glee, or scares you to humility. The following quotes and quantities are from Bill Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything.

The beginnings of our universe, what is called the Big Bang, happened at unfathomable rates and circumstances. At first, 13.7 billion years ago, “There is no time. Time doesn’t exist”.

Lemaitre, who first conceived the Big Bang theory, said that the universe began as a geometrical point, describing it as a "primeval atom," and then “from nothing, our universe begins.” Within the first minute, the universe is “a million billion miles across,” and by three minutes of the expansion, “98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced.”

The universe “[doubled] in size every one million million million million-millionths of a second” from a microscopic point, to “10,000,000,000,000000,000,000,000 times bigger.” This all seems absurd no doubt, as the numbers exceed that of human understanding; but this is just the beginning.

It is worth pondering just in fact the size and dimension of the universe. Bryson says that “the universe we know and can talk about is a million million million million miles across” and he continues, saying that its edge from us is “90 trillion miles away.” Even the night sky visible from Earth is enormously far away. If one was to make a solar system chart on paper, “even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was a [period], and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 meters away [from Earth].”

Going out to the nearest star, “to reach [Alpha Centauri] by spaceship would take at least twenty-five thousand years.” And simply covers the size in the third dimension. Even about just the fourth, Bryson says “our brains can take us only so far, because it is so nearly impossible to envision a dimension comprising three parts space and one-part time...” If one thought simply the size of the universe was hard to grasp cognitively, think about the dimension.

It was previously stated that “it may be that our universe is merely a part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place." One can’t be sure if the word “bonkers” has a place in science, but if it does, it is here.

Without even mentioning the amount of energy present in the universe, as “a supernova...[releases] in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns,” or the possibility of life elsewhere than earth, as “the number of advanced civilizations just in the milky way works out to be somewhere in the millions,” the universe comes out to be utterly and troublingly complex and gargantuan.

I know that without context these numbers can seem pretty arbitrary, but hopefully, they illustrated even just a glimpse of how unbelievably minute we all are. This should never serve to discourage us, though, as the issues we deem important for ourselves will always be worthwhile. However, maybe the vastness around us could guide us into letting go of the little things.