ASAD 1000
Ewa Nowak
September 25, 2012 Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about creation and how small we are in relationship to our galaxy and our vast universe. I stepped out on my deck the other night to get out for some fresh air after a nights rain and I tilted my head up to the sky, admiring how bright it was that night. As I looked around for the moon, I noticed its absence and in its place shown a glowing band of light that stretched across the entire nights sky. I knew this sight because it was our very own Milky Way, but for the first time in my life I felt not small in comparison to the universe, but quite large. Thirteen billion years ago when the big bang happened, all we know that exists; light and gravity, the one hundred-billion galaxies that liter our universe, our earth and life itself literally resulted from this one event. To comprehend the true vastness of what was created in just a few seconds after the big bang, we have to understand how big a single light-year is. A distance of a hundred miles, a thousand miles, and even the circumference of the earth are comprehendible for the human mind to understand however, a light-year is six trillion miles. To try to understand just how far apart things are in just in our own Milky Way galaxy, we can look at the closest star to us. That star is called Proxima Centuri, which is 4.2 light-years or around two hundred and forty trillion miles away. This fact is mind boggling to say the least but is still small in comparison to the grandeur of the universe.
As I went through these facts in my head, my own existence seemed more trivial but yet I felt more and more lucky that I had my own place in our world. It’s amazing to me to think that I came into existence on this one small planet, in our small solar system, fed by the light of one star, which is part of an unimaginable number of stars that light the darkness of space. Is a flat tire really that big of a deal? Is missing my favorite show really something I should be upset about? These types of questions flooded my head and made me realize that what was really important was not understanding happiness through events and objects, but understanding happiness through knowing my place in the universe. Suddenly I stood in a world that belonged to me. At that moment, looking at the stars became not only a beautiful sight to admire but I
