It's the end of the semester, and I have some time to blog again. I also have some time to take a step back from those problems of life that take on an enormous psychic scale (like final exams), but, in the grand scheme of things, are not such a big deal.
As we saw a couple of weeks ago when we whyrooters tried to figure out how to spend $5 billion, we all came to the conclusion that it's really not enough money to solve any of the world's biggest problems. Give me $5 billion, on the other hand, and you would solve my money problems many times over. (I figure $5 million would pretty much set me for life, so $5 billion would pay for 1,000 comfortable lifetimes.) As it turns out, I'm only one of billions of people on the planet, and at that scale my money problems don't amount to much.
Of course our entire race's problems are infinitessimal when you account for the planets around the 70 sextillion visible stars scientists had found by 2003. That's a lot of planets, and (very likely) a lot of intelligent life. While Nobel prize winners have already started thinking about the very big problems we're likely to face interacting with all of these stars, including the economics of interstellar trade, the sheer number of aliens and their problems likely dwarfs the human race's complaints.
But that number of stars is again dwarfed by the number of parallel universes that could exist. Recent observations suggest that the anti-gravitational power of dark energy is within 5 percent of the cosmological constant Einstein hypothesized as the force preventing the universe from collapsing on itself. Unfortunately, if this finding holds, there may have to be 10 to the 500th parallel universes to explain the existence of ours.
Don't these numbers mislead us about our own importance? After all, the scale of the universe(s) can't convince any of us that our own existence isn't pretty damn important to ourselves. To this I say: we don't actually exist. So add another nesting doll to our set -- our 10 to the 500th parallel universes (or at least our one universe) exist within goodness knows how many parallel simulations of our universes.
I think all of us have had the experience of staring up at the stars and getting an inkling of our tininess. Thank goodness we couldn't see more than those 70 sextillion.
-- Nathan Huttner
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