I was watching a thing the other day where some scientist explained that our entire universe might be a small bubble in some much bigger thing.
This, in turn, threw me into a “reality moment.” During which I freaked out for a second before returning back to my normal delusional state.
Let me explain further.
Humans, including myself, spend most of their time with a delusional blindfold on. This blindfold allows us to care about stuff that happens in life. Because in reality, life is completely, totally, and comically unimportant.
Let’s look at it for second. Our universe has been around for 15 billion years. Humans biologically identical to us have been around for about 100,000 years. So let’s create a small scale to put that in perspective. Let’s divide everything by 100 million and say the universe has been around for 150 years. If that’s the case, humans have been around for 8.5 hours. So if the universe were a civil war battle sight dating back to 1860, the human race is a tourist that arrived today to check it out.
And that’s 100,000 years of human history.
Think about that for a second. When we talk about BC and AD, we’re talking about 2,000 years. Ancient Rome, Ancient Egypt, Aristotle and Plato, Jesus, Confucius, the Vikings, the Crusades, all of that old shit—we’re talking about 2 or 3,000 years of history, or about 1/50th of all of human history. In our civil war battle sight scale, Jesus showed up about 10 minutes ago.
Now a person lives about 100 years. That’s 1/20th of this recent history and 1/1000th of all human history. If the universe is 150 years old, each human lives about 30 seconds. As a 27-year-old, I’ve been around for 8 seconds.
Okay, so that’s time—let’s move onto space for a second.
The universe has been expanding at light speed for 15 billion years, meaning it is currently a sphere with a radius of 15 billion light years and diameter of 30 billion light years.*
To put that in perspective, light travels 186,000 miles in a second, meaning a “light second” is a distance that would wrap around the Earth seven times. So a light year is impossibly huge. And the universe is 30 billion light years across.
Not a small sphere.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way (a really stupid name for a galaxy, by the way), is a disk about 100,000 light years across. And the Earth is a sphere with a diameter of 8,000 miles.
So to scale this all down, let’s say the universe is the size of the Earth. If that’s the case, the Milky Way is a disk 140 feet across—an ice skating rink.
Using that same scale, 1 light year would be .43 millimeters, about the width of a grain of sand (making a cubic light year one grain of sand).
And 1 light year is 733,212,000 times longer than the diameter of the Earth (8,000 miles). So 700 million Earths stacked on top of each other would be the height of one grain of sand.
I’ll spare you the math here,** but that means that if the universe is the size of the Earth, you could fit over 300 octillion, or 300 trillion trillion, Earths in one grain of sand.
To take it a step further, if a human is about 5 cubic feet in volume, you could fit 6 billion trillion humans in each tiny Earth speck.
In the "Universe = the size of the Earth" scale, one human is the tiniest, most microscopic of all microscopic particles.
Now—I’ve been here before. I think I was about 6 the first time I started to boggle my mind thinking about the instant of time and speck of space we each occupy before evaporating into non-existence for the rest of eternity.
But this thing I watched on TV—this “The universe may only be a tiny bubble in a much greater thing”—threw me for a new loop.
Because what that means is that our whole universe might be incredibly tiny in the scheme of all things, and if it is just one expanding bubble, it means that its own 15 billion year existence might be a speck of time itself.
Which makes the time and space of a human even more of a needledick.
But here’s the crazy thing about humans—humans are smart enough that they know how insignificant they are. We are the only species on Earth that can conceive of either our own insignificance or our own death. Indeed, I am a microscopic particle here for only a brief moment who knows that I am a microscopic particle here for only a brief moment. A person is a speck of nothing who materializes for a split second, realizes where it stands in the scheme of time and space, understands that it will soon disappear back into nothingness for eternity, says “Wait, what the hell?”, and then disappears into nothingness for eternity.
A human appears out of nowhere—gets it—and then vanishes.
And all of this begs the question:
If I know that I am the tiniest speck of dust around for a split second only, then why was I so upset when my fantasy football team lost on Sunday?
Why do we care so much about what happens in life?
Because of our delusional blindfolds. Thank god for the delusional blindfolds.
Humans, though intelligent enough to realize the intense and harsh truth, also have a built-in brain mechanism that makes us kind of “forget” about it on a day-to-day basis. And once we’ve stopped thinking about the truth, we can get all worked up about life and be good people and we can be passionate and enthusiastic about things and we can care about consequences and family and relationships and friends and sports and everything else. Which makes our 30 seconds of existence way more enjoyable. The world would be a pretty grim place without the delusional blindfolds.***
The fact is, even now as I’m writing this, my delusional blindfold is back on. I know this because I’m not really upset about any of this—it just fascinates me. But when I heard that guy say that thing about the universe being a bubble, I had one of those really intense moments where the reality pierced the blindfold for a moment and I was like, “Oh my GOD!!” and that’s what prompted me to write this in the first place.
And so, I’m gonna go back now to doing my microscopic thing here for my 30 seconds. Might as well be a happy little speck.
____________
*This is the size of the “observable universe” which is, according to many scientists, far smaller than the full extent of the universe. And while 30 billion light years is often cited as the diameter of the observable universe, others have suggested differing sizes based on the curvature of time-space and other factors that I don’t understand.
**Since the Earth and a grain of sand have volume, you have to cube that first magnitude to figure out how many Earths could fit inside that grain of sand. What we’re really figuring out is how many Earths could fit in a cubic light year. And since 733,212,000 Earths, lined up, would equal the cube’s edge, we cube that total to get the amount of Earths that would fit inside the cubic lightyear—or in our “Universe = Earth” scale, the grain of sand. 700 million cubed is about 300 trillion trillion.
While we're here, I came up with these rough approximations while in nerd mode:
Earth diameter x 100 =
Sun diameter x 100 =
Earth orbit diameter x 100 =
Solar System diameter x 1,000 =
One light year x 100,000 =
Milky Way diameter x 300,000 =
Observable Universe diameter
***The microscopic elephant speck in the room here is that I’m clearly not religious, and someone who is will probably see things quite differently. Religious people who believe strongly in some form of afterlife don’t need a delusional blindfold, because for them, reality is not something you need to try to forget about all the time.
Top of the Heap
I was reading a Thomas Friedman column the other day, and he mentioned the “blogosphere,” which he said “at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world.”
Then I thought about my blog and how I talk about toast and stuff, and I felt bad about myself.
Like, people always say things like, “the unfortunate gaffe was devoured and sharply criticized by bloggers,” or “the breaking news shot through the blogosphere at lightning speed” – and then I’m over here talking about which shirt color you should wear when you’re sweating and trying to figure out how washing machines work.
The point is, this blog is an extremely irrelevant one in the blogosphere. Like, the blogosphere is definitely very irked that this blog is inside the sphere. I’m picturing the blogosphere as a congress in session—and they’re all voting on shit and debating stuff and then this one congressman is alone at his desk, away from everyone, staring intently at a tower of slinkies he has constructed, and debating in his head whether he should go for one more slinky, or if that’s pushing his luck. That’s this blog.
And since I have now been in New York for almost three weeks, it seems like a perfect time to fire 14 further irrelevancies right into the heart of the blogosphere:
-Moving from LA to New York is a bit of a shock. Everything that sucks about LA is great in New York, and everything that’s great about LA sucks in New York.
-When you get to someone’s apartment, they usually have to buzz you in. The other day, someone buzzed me in, and then like 12 seconds later when I was getting in the elevator, the buzz was still going. This was insulting. Like, them buzzing that long was them sitting there holding the buzzer, thinking, “Tim’s a pretty big idiot—I want to give him enough time to figure out how to open both doors and get inside.” In fact, I would say that this is a good litmus test of how dumb the person buzzing thinks the person they’re buzzing in is—the longer they hold the buzzer, the dumber they think you are.
-In LA, as you know, the weather is impeccable—80 and sunny basically every day of the year. The problem with that is, you always feel like shit watching TV or going to a movie. You can never sit inside on a rainy or snowy day and be all cozy and watch TV or football or play board games or do whatever all day. When you do that in LA, the sun and beautiful weather through the window makes it automatically depressing. I’ve said many times that I actually really miss the bad weather days of the East Coast. Then, the other day while sprinting through the street in the pouring rain (no umbrella because I’m an idiot), stomping through puddles, I cursed myself for all of my earlier statements. It basically rains 80% of the time in New York.
-Twice now I’ve gone to a bar for dinner and asked for the menu and they’ve given me a stack of take-out menus and told me to order from one of the places and that they’ll deliver it to the bar. Apparently this is common here. Didn’t happen once in five years in LA.
-In LA, if you head out for a big night, you’re just starting to have fun when they flick the “last call” lights on and off at 1:30am. Horrible. Most US cities are like that. Suddenly, I can actually stay out when I’m having fun, as things keep hopping until 3 or 4am. A huge plus to this city.
-Another plus is that I suddenly have an element of exercise in my life in the form of walking everywhere, after not moving for the last five years. If I have the time, I’ll basically walk anywhere I need to go here. It’s not just that the distances are more reasonable in New York—it’s that the walks are interesting. In LA, a 45-minute walk is on some suburban-feeling sidewalk with nothing but cars going by. You feel like you’re wasting your time. But in New York, you walk past a thousand people, a hundred shops and restaurants, and dozens of different sections of the city, all with different cultures.
-I went into a little Chinese take-out place in Chinatown the other day, and they were extremely rude and basically ignored me until I finally gave up trying to order and left. No culture is more insular and less interested in integrating than Chinatowns in US cities.
-I’ve moved into an apartment on the Lower East Side. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. A friend needed a new roommate and the area seemed cool. Do I feel like I might get mugged every time I come back late at night? Yes. But after getting used to having to endure a 15-minute drive to get to any restaurants or coffee places and a 20-minute cab ride to get to the nearest bar, having 40 restaurants and 30 bars within a 10 minute walk is incredibly exciting.
-When you first move into a new apartment, the first 24 hours are fascinating, because you’re learning all of these critical facts about your future life. Like opening the shower curtain for the first time and hearing the rings screech against the bar and being like, “Well, that screech is gonna be a big part of my life” or being woken up by a screaming, crying kid in a nearby apartment on your first morning and realizing that you will be forming a deep, dark, passionate hatred over the months ahead.
-Along those lines, I was out late the other night and came back wanting food, and the only place open was a weird Russian restaurant. I went in and asked for a menu, and the woman was like, “You have the beef!” Frightened, I sat down, and a few minutes later, she brought me a plate of beef. I ate it and felt horrible a half-hour later lying in bed. The problem is, it is on my block and apparently the only place open in the wee hours, which means I’ll be served a plate of beef about 50 times over the next six months by that woman. Not good.
-On the plus side, there is a matzah factory a block away from my apartment. I discovered it last week and stood there staring at their operation, fascinated, and creeped them out until they finally gave me a piece of matzah in hopes that I’d then leave. Very exciting discovery.
-My company’s LA branch is currently being run by my business partner and our two LA directors. Soon, there will be a New York director and a New York office and Tim will be on a Normal Person Schedule. The thing is, though, that at the moment it’s just me running the New York branch, and without having other people to work with every day and an adult place in which to work, I have found myself quickly slipping back into the Tim-Zone, somewhere I haven’t been in about three years. In the Tim-Zone, my schedule drifts back and back until I’m both waking up and going to sleep at hours that I can’t tell other people. I’m like a 19-year-old girl who went to a religious all-girls high school and was repressed by her parents and then sluts it up freshman year of college. Suddenly with no checks and balances, I’ve found myself on Hawaii time. My goal is to get on Pacific time by November and eventually settle into Mountain time (which walks the fine line between respectable and inhumane). At the moment, though, it’s getting ugly. The other day, I found myself telling someone in all seriousness that I had an “early meeting” the next day, which was at noon. I unintentionally fasted until 5pm a couple days ago, and it wasn't Yom Kippur. And on the back side, I’ve been creeping people out by sending work emails at 2am.
-As we do not yet have a New York office, I’ve been spending a ridiculous amount of time each week working in Starbucks. Starbucks and I have gotten pretty tight at this point. It has free internet, plentiful outlets, delicious coffee and tea, serviceable food, a bathroom, and constant entertaining people-watching. And when Starbucks is your office, no matter where you are in the city, your office is right down the block. I’ve been adamantly sticking to one cup of coffee a day, so I don’t die. Caffeine has a ridiculously strong effect on me. In the two hours after having a cup of Starbucks coffee, I’m suddenly incredibly SMART and AMBITIOUS and CONFIDENT and OPTIMISTIC and OPEN-MINDED and DRIVEN. Then, a few hours after that, I want to quit everything in the world immediately and move to Tuvalu and lie there and slowly pass away. So I keep it to tea after the morning cup.
-It crossed my mind to check out the New York Harvard Club as a place to conduct interviews. So I went to the website to see what the deal was with it, what it cost, etc. and I was completely struck by the pictures they put on the website. Now, Harvard is obviously a ridiculous entity, but this was impressive even for them—the pictures on the website could have been straight out of The Onion. They picked the douchiest, most stereotypical Harvard pictures possible. The below picture was my favorite. Tell me The Onion could have come up with someone better than this guy:
Three more things:
-The recent Budweiser “cheesy game-show” commercials with the “grooler” or whatever are possibly the worst commercials anyone has ever made. I have no idea how anyone thought those would be good commercials.
-This is cool.
-The baseball playoffs are back. As usual, I’m completely petrified and stressed out. So much potential for misery. Also, my thick, quivering hatred of the Yankees and their loathsome fans is going to become even thicker and more quivery by living in New York.
Then I thought about my blog and how I talk about toast and stuff, and I felt bad about myself.
Like, people always say things like, “the unfortunate gaffe was devoured and sharply criticized by bloggers,” or “the breaking news shot through the blogosphere at lightning speed” – and then I’m over here talking about which shirt color you should wear when you’re sweating and trying to figure out how washing machines work.
The point is, this blog is an extremely irrelevant one in the blogosphere. Like, the blogosphere is definitely very irked that this blog is inside the sphere. I’m picturing the blogosphere as a congress in session—and they’re all voting on shit and debating stuff and then this one congressman is alone at his desk, away from everyone, staring intently at a tower of slinkies he has constructed, and debating in his head whether he should go for one more slinky, or if that’s pushing his luck. That’s this blog.
And since I have now been in New York for almost three weeks, it seems like a perfect time to fire 14 further irrelevancies right into the heart of the blogosphere:
-Moving from LA to New York is a bit of a shock. Everything that sucks about LA is great in New York, and everything that’s great about LA sucks in New York.
-When you get to someone’s apartment, they usually have to buzz you in. The other day, someone buzzed me in, and then like 12 seconds later when I was getting in the elevator, the buzz was still going. This was insulting. Like, them buzzing that long was them sitting there holding the buzzer, thinking, “Tim’s a pretty big idiot—I want to give him enough time to figure out how to open both doors and get inside.” In fact, I would say that this is a good litmus test of how dumb the person buzzing thinks the person they’re buzzing in is—the longer they hold the buzzer, the dumber they think you are.
-In LA, as you know, the weather is impeccable—80 and sunny basically every day of the year. The problem with that is, you always feel like shit watching TV or going to a movie. You can never sit inside on a rainy or snowy day and be all cozy and watch TV or football or play board games or do whatever all day. When you do that in LA, the sun and beautiful weather through the window makes it automatically depressing. I’ve said many times that I actually really miss the bad weather days of the East Coast. Then, the other day while sprinting through the street in the pouring rain (no umbrella because I’m an idiot), stomping through puddles, I cursed myself for all of my earlier statements. It basically rains 80% of the time in New York.
-Twice now I’ve gone to a bar for dinner and asked for the menu and they’ve given me a stack of take-out menus and told me to order from one of the places and that they’ll deliver it to the bar. Apparently this is common here. Didn’t happen once in five years in LA.
-In LA, if you head out for a big night, you’re just starting to have fun when they flick the “last call” lights on and off at 1:30am. Horrible. Most US cities are like that. Suddenly, I can actually stay out when I’m having fun, as things keep hopping until 3 or 4am. A huge plus to this city.
-Another plus is that I suddenly have an element of exercise in my life in the form of walking everywhere, after not moving for the last five years. If I have the time, I’ll basically walk anywhere I need to go here. It’s not just that the distances are more reasonable in New York—it’s that the walks are interesting. In LA, a 45-minute walk is on some suburban-feeling sidewalk with nothing but cars going by. You feel like you’re wasting your time. But in New York, you walk past a thousand people, a hundred shops and restaurants, and dozens of different sections of the city, all with different cultures.
-I went into a little Chinese take-out place in Chinatown the other day, and they were extremely rude and basically ignored me until I finally gave up trying to order and left. No culture is more insular and less interested in integrating than Chinatowns in US cities.
-I’ve moved into an apartment on the Lower East Side. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. A friend needed a new roommate and the area seemed cool. Do I feel like I might get mugged every time I come back late at night? Yes. But after getting used to having to endure a 15-minute drive to get to any restaurants or coffee places and a 20-minute cab ride to get to the nearest bar, having 40 restaurants and 30 bars within a 10 minute walk is incredibly exciting.
-When you first move into a new apartment, the first 24 hours are fascinating, because you’re learning all of these critical facts about your future life. Like opening the shower curtain for the first time and hearing the rings screech against the bar and being like, “Well, that screech is gonna be a big part of my life” or being woken up by a screaming, crying kid in a nearby apartment on your first morning and realizing that you will be forming a deep, dark, passionate hatred over the months ahead.
-Along those lines, I was out late the other night and came back wanting food, and the only place open was a weird Russian restaurant. I went in and asked for a menu, and the woman was like, “You have the beef!” Frightened, I sat down, and a few minutes later, she brought me a plate of beef. I ate it and felt horrible a half-hour later lying in bed. The problem is, it is on my block and apparently the only place open in the wee hours, which means I’ll be served a plate of beef about 50 times over the next six months by that woman. Not good.
-On the plus side, there is a matzah factory a block away from my apartment. I discovered it last week and stood there staring at their operation, fascinated, and creeped them out until they finally gave me a piece of matzah in hopes that I’d then leave. Very exciting discovery.
-My company’s LA branch is currently being run by my business partner and our two LA directors. Soon, there will be a New York director and a New York office and Tim will be on a Normal Person Schedule. The thing is, though, that at the moment it’s just me running the New York branch, and without having other people to work with every day and an adult place in which to work, I have found myself quickly slipping back into the Tim-Zone, somewhere I haven’t been in about three years. In the Tim-Zone, my schedule drifts back and back until I’m both waking up and going to sleep at hours that I can’t tell other people. I’m like a 19-year-old girl who went to a religious all-girls high school and was repressed by her parents and then sluts it up freshman year of college. Suddenly with no checks and balances, I’ve found myself on Hawaii time. My goal is to get on Pacific time by November and eventually settle into Mountain time (which walks the fine line between respectable and inhumane). At the moment, though, it’s getting ugly. The other day, I found myself telling someone in all seriousness that I had an “early meeting” the next day, which was at noon. I unintentionally fasted until 5pm a couple days ago, and it wasn't Yom Kippur. And on the back side, I’ve been creeping people out by sending work emails at 2am.
-As we do not yet have a New York office, I’ve been spending a ridiculous amount of time each week working in Starbucks. Starbucks and I have gotten pretty tight at this point. It has free internet, plentiful outlets, delicious coffee and tea, serviceable food, a bathroom, and constant entertaining people-watching. And when Starbucks is your office, no matter where you are in the city, your office is right down the block. I’ve been adamantly sticking to one cup of coffee a day, so I don’t die. Caffeine has a ridiculously strong effect on me. In the two hours after having a cup of Starbucks coffee, I’m suddenly incredibly SMART and AMBITIOUS and CONFIDENT and OPTIMISTIC and OPEN-MINDED and DRIVEN. Then, a few hours after that, I want to quit everything in the world immediately and move to Tuvalu and lie there and slowly pass away. So I keep it to tea after the morning cup.
-It crossed my mind to check out the New York Harvard Club as a place to conduct interviews. So I went to the website to see what the deal was with it, what it cost, etc. and I was completely struck by the pictures they put on the website. Now, Harvard is obviously a ridiculous entity, but this was impressive even for them—the pictures on the website could have been straight out of The Onion. They picked the douchiest, most stereotypical Harvard pictures possible. The below picture was my favorite. Tell me The Onion could have come up with someone better than this guy:
Three more things:
-The recent Budweiser “cheesy game-show” commercials with the “grooler” or whatever are possibly the worst commercials anyone has ever made. I have no idea how anyone thought those would be good commercials.
-This is cool.
-The baseball playoffs are back. As usual, I’m completely petrified and stressed out. So much potential for misery. Also, my thick, quivering hatred of the Yankees and their loathsome fans is going to become even thicker and more quivery by living in New York.
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