Too Much Too Fast Too Strong Too Soon - 3/30/2014

Lovecraft invented the idea that there were things that the human mind could not contain. That the mere apprehension of them would render someone incapable of rational thought thereafter. Whether physical things or creatures, or simply bits of knowledge, even individual words, he brought forth the idea that not only is man not paramount in the universe, not only is he insignificant, he is incapable of functioning on any number of higher levels that are commonplace.

And that is a pretty good description of horror. To be confronted not with something that is not understood, but which cannot be understood. The horror that fascinates us, such as the serial killer, is not in that a human is capable of such acts, but that there is no comprehensible reason for it. In order to defuse that horror, police procedurals and manhunt movies use psychology and simplifications of psychology to explain that certain events cause people to respond in certain ways.

But the simple fact is, there are things we don't understand and, in the end, can't understand. Science has its limits, so far, and the human mind is most adept at putting new things in terms of things already understood (hence the word analogy). But even without horror, there are things that most people simply can't encompass. There are mathematicians who claim to be able to visualize 4 or more-dimensional space, which is something I can't even figure out how to approach.

Scale is another one. There are 7 billion people in the world, roughly. In order to understand what that number means, we have to resort to a series of reductions and analogies that bring the numbers into something that a person can easily comprehend. There are on the order of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. That means, assuming that the Milky Way is roughly average, that there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that's 10 sextillion) stars in the universe. That's about a thousand times as many grains of sand as exist on all the beaches and deserts in the world (can't find a count that includes river/lake/ocean floors).

That means that, in order for there to be as many grains of sand on Earth beaches as there are stars in the observable universe, we would have to replicate the Earth, perfectly, 1,000 times.

Think about that one for a minute. If it doesn't tweak your gourd a little, you're not thinking hard enough.

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