In the USA and other developed countries the experience of seeing a deep black sky is uncommon. The main problem in the USA is that you have to be outside on a moonless night with a clear sky and in a place with little artificial lighting. Most of us are never in this situation when we are at home. One of the wonderful things about sailing is that your “house” is pretty small so you spend a lot of time outside both in the daytime and at night.
The night sky in very lightly populated areas is an unbelievable sight! Most of us probably had the experience in our youth of laying on our backs in a field on a dark moonless night and staring at the sky. I remember the wonder of so many, many stars in the sky. I still feel that wonder when I go up on deck on a clear dark night and look up. It is truly unbelievable that so many “suns” exist! It is humbling, partly because our home, planet earth, has a relatively insignificant position in the physical universe and in the scope and size of the creation.
When anchored off an uninhabited island at night, I feel this wonder and amazement again. In some ways I’m amazed how little I’ve changed in 61 years here on earth. Looking at this view, the same wonder, questions, and amazement return to my mind. I’ve realized that some of the things we thought in our youth were not so childish after all. The feeling becomes meditative as I let my vision focus on the whole sky rather than looking at specific stars or regions. I’ve heard the term “soft eyes” to describe looking at something this way and that is a good way to think about it. This sky seems truly endless and it is filled with a vast spread of what must be millions of stars. Each of these stars may have planetary bodies orbiting it. It’s hard to get my small human brain around these huge numbers. We have no real perspective on what a billion anything looks like.
When my “rational” mind wakes up after a few minutes of wonder, there is a fact that I learned some time ago that always rises up. That fact is that if you remove the empty space in everything in the known universe, the size of the solid bits would be somewhere between agolf ball and a tennis ball. We and everything we are aware of in our existence are mostly empty space with some solid sub-atomic particles whirling around within each atom.
This would be amazing enough if a human being with all the space removed was that size, or if your car would be that size. However, this is everything I see and can’t see in that dark night sky. Every star, every planet, every creature, every everything! If it makes you feel any better, this little ball would be really, really heavy!
So we and everything else in creation are mostly empty space! Depending on your beliefs and attitude to things that seem “outside of reality”, or “beyond the facts that are obvious from what we see and touch”, you will react to this differently, but I challenge you to ponder this. I don’t think it is possible to really grasp this emptiness in everything since it really is beyond anything tangible, but I do think it is healthy for us humans to ponder how much we don’t know, how much of the creation is unknowable, and how much mystery remains in the creation. It is clear to me that there remains a lot us humans are pretty clueless about.
So take some time on a clear night at your home and just go outside and stare at the sky like you did as a child. Lay on your back on a towel or right on the ground. Don’t think too much, don’t use your eyes to flit back and forth between the things in the sky, just be there, breathing gently, letting your eyes go “soft” and take it all in.
Creation retains mystery and I think that is a good thing!
Thanks for reading!
David
(Note: based on another google search to confirm my tennis ball size above (on the not-so-fast Bahamas cell service), there is some controversy about the actual size, but suffice it to say it would be very much smaller than what we see around us and all of it would fit into a pretty small space.)
Note: Picture at the top is actually a picture of the sun with a circular "rainbow" around it that we saw one day while on Eleuthera Island.
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