Our Universe is Amazing!

Our universe is amazing! Just thinking about it can expand your mind and give you a perspective you never had before!


Our sun is 93 million miles from earth. It is a million miles across and a million earths could fit within it's perimeter. There are over 100 billion stars, ( suns) in our Milky Way galaxy and there are over 100 billion galaxies in the known universe! Start multiplying that out and your calculator will soon run out of 0s! :~) As a matter of fact, there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of earth put together! That makes out the universe to be a pretty darn big place!


If you think it is hot on a summer day consider the fact that at the center of the sun it is over 27 million degrees! And if you think it is cold on a winter day compare that to the 100s of degrees below zero of much of space. We have it better than we realized! :~)

Our sun may seem big to us, but compared to other ones it is small. There are lots of stars that are thousands of times bigger with temperatures hundreds of times hotter. It is essentially a big ball of gas and plasma that has turned into a nuclear fusion reactor. The same process we have seen on earth with the explosion of hydrogen bombs. Scientists are working on trying to come up with ways to produce controlled fusion reactors to replace the fission type we have now and if they ever do we may well have unlimited energy at our disposal for everyone on earth!

If you want to switch from the macro, very big, to the micro, very small, the universe still stays amazing! The small can be very small. All the material universe is made up of elemental particles, protons, neutrons and electrons. Take one electron and one proton and put them together and you have a hydrogen atom. Take a couple of those and throw in an oxygen atom, which has 8 protons and you have a water molecule.

How big or small is that? Well, if you counted up the number of water molecules in a glass of water the number would be larger than all the cups of water in all the oceans on the whole planet!

So you can see, whether you decide to look to the very, very big or the very, very small, our planet, solar system, Milky Way galaxy and universe is a very amazing place indeed!

How about the amazing diversity of life on our planet, the only place we are sure there is life in the universe. Everyone is amazed by what computers can do. An amazing fact about computers is that everything they do is done by manipulating code that is only comprised of 2 types of numbers, 1s and 0s. The diversity of life has a leg up on that since all the life, from the tiniest ant, to the biggest elephant or whale, is controlled by a DNA genetic code that is comprised of 4 chemicals, CTGA.

Life has filled all the niches from the highest levels of our atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean. The Cs, Ts, Gs and As transpose and juxtapose to form life into whatever it takes to live and thrive in whatever the environment has to offer.

Life can survive in the hundreds of degrees below 0 in space, to the hundreds of degrees above 0 at volcanic thermal vents on the bottom of the ocean. It can keep on trucking in 0 gravity and 0 pressure to the tons of pressure per square inch at 7 miles down in the depths of the ocean.

Even though over 90% of the species that have ever lived on earth are extinct, people are diving down to the depths of the ocean and discovering new species that have never been seen by man, almost daily!

It is estimated that over 20 billion people do now live, or have lived and died on planet earth and yet each one has or had different finger prints!

Yes, that CTG and A have been busy and prolific and they continue to bring about new changes, especially since man has gotten involved and now can make designer genes.

The universe has been expanding since the big bang. So our whole playground is getting even bigger every day! Scientists have just starting discovering and understanding dark matter and dark energy. Claims have been made that the visible universe that we can see comprises only single digit percentages of everything that is really out there, and look at how it can blow one's mind just trying to wrap your brain around what we do already know exists.

I have spent over 30 years studying different sciences to learn. The more you learn the more questions you seem to end up generating. Get the answers to those and you may well end up now having 10 times as many questions! I think it is worth it, even though it certainly keeps you humble, this more questions than answers ratio.

The quest to know has allowed the modern world to enjoy convenience and luxury beyond the wildest dreams of people even just 50 years ago because people wanted to know the how and why of things and were willing to do the work to find out.

Where are we headed from here? A big question most certainly! I have a background of being a former computer guru. I lived through and studied the PC revolution. It didn't take long to learn to no longer say, "They will never be able to do that!"

Today it would seem that even science fiction writers must be having a hard time coming up with ideas as to how the world will change since things written even just 5 years ago may well have already been eclipsed by reality!

I think we are headed for a better future. Nano technology has just started to flex it's muscles. I have seen jet engines smaller than a postage stamp and medicine is just learning how to harness things on the billionth scale to make the body work more efficiently.

This paper has to stop somewhere and I guess this is a good spot. It is not stopping because I have run out of amazing things to say about our universe, but as a biological entity I have to eat! LOL!

Please feel free to write me to share your observations about our amazing universe. Thank you and have a wonderful day!

Dave Briggs :~)