God, Galactus and the Universe

The photos that have come back from the Hubble telescope have had a fairly profound impact on me.

I'm a little conflicted about this. On the one hand, expending all the time, money and energy to see stuff billions of light years away (or billions and billions of light years away, if you remember Carl Sagan's Cosmos) seems sort of pointless and silly.

On the other hand, well, holy shit:



Some of those bright spots are galaxies, as you'll see if you click on the thumbnail for the larger version of the picture.

Astronomers will make one thing of this, and I will make another.

Even though someone could probably tell us what the field of view is in that picture, it's a number so large we can't conceive of it, even as we're looking at it right there in front of us.

An experienced world traveler might have some concept of the size of the earth, but for the rest of us it's just a number from the World Almanac: 24,900 miles. We can't even actually conceive of that, let alone the view in that Hubble picture. (And personally, my sense of scale tends to lapse into the fabulous anywhere beyond Danforth Road.)

Imagine that picture projected onto the side of a 20-story building. Now, it's pretty damn big by our earthly standards, yet still not even a thumbnail representation of the real thing. But look at that twenty-story picture, where the earth, were it to be shown, would be maybe the size of a marble.

How big would your concept of God be in that picture? As I thought about it, I decided that my concept of God –– and I'm talking about the traditional Judeo-Christian Sistine Chapel God –– would probably be about 20 feet tall compared to a marble-sized earth.

(Galactus would top out, by comparison, at about three feet.)

And yet God –– as my limited imagination pictures him –– would still be dwarfed by the scale of that picture.

We are led to believe that whatever force created that huge cloud, billions of miles across, and made those galaxies spinning like 4th of July sparklers through the sky is profoundly concerned about gay Teletubbies, the Dixie Chicks, and concealed carry.

Well, you decide what you want to believe about that.

But here's the deal: that picture is a picture of you. You are all that. And all that is you. It's all one thing. At the subatomic level, you can't even tell where the traditional concept of 'you' ends and the traditional concept of 'everything else' begins.

You are all your friends and enemies. You are George W. Bush. You're me. You're an apple. You're Beasley the cat.

All one thing.

The universe.

Beasley the cat.