Lend me your Eyes, I can change what you See

I'm about to show you guys what I think is my favourite picture. Well maybe 'favourite' isn't the word to use here, but the following picture hits me the hardest and has the most impact for me, more so than any other picture I've ever seen. It makes me stop and ponder like no other picture ever has, in a way no other picture ever does. Here it is:

Click on it for sull size view and the full impact of the photo, but careful; it's an 18meg file and the resolution is about 6200x6200

Don't know what that image is? That's called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. An image (or series of images) taken by the Hubble telescope over a period of time from September 24, 2003, to January 16, 2004. Hundreds of exposures were taken to compile the above image, with a total accumulated exposure time of one million seconds (I'm going to type out every number/figure for this post. It has more impact that way, I feel). This image is the deepest ever look taken at the universe, looking farther back in time than ever before, to a period roughly four hundred to eight hundred million years after the Big Bang, showing galaxies never seen before by human eyes. And that image, as unfathomably large and vast as it is, shows barely the tiniest fraction of the total sky. In fact, it shows only one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky. For the Hubble Telescope to observe the whole sky to the same depth, it would need to observe continuously for one million years.

There are various other facts and figures that I could list here that would boggle the mind, but the figure I find most staggering is that this image alone shows over ten thousand galaxies.

Ten. Thousand. Galaxies.

Ten thousand possibilities for planets that harbour and support life. Ten thousand.

That fact alone always makes me pause and just contemplate the gravity of what that means, of how impossibly big the universe is, and inversely, how small we are in the greater scale of things. It really makes me stop and think. Our entire galaxy (which contains an estimated two hundred billion stars and fifty billion planets), as titanically vast as it is (approximately one hundred thousand light years from end-to-end), it isn't even a speck in the vastness that is our universe. We shouldn't even register on the relative scale of the galaxy. I don't think humans will ever come close to being able to comprehend the size and scope of our own galaxy, let alone the universe; the numbers are just too big, too dizzying, too hard to comprehend.

Take our Sun for example. Compared to Earth, it's colossal, truly massive. You could fit our Earth (roughly forty two thousand km in circumference) into the sun one million and three hundred thousand times. And yet... our Sun is small. Compared to the majority of stars out there in our galaxy alone, it's smaller than a significant bulk of them. It's even dwarfed by some of them. Betelgeuse and Antares for example, put our Sun to shame. Here's a comparison shot, just to put that into perspective;

Sorry about the botched alignment, only way to read the wrting though.

As you can (barely) see, our Sun isn't even 1 pixel big in this image. It's not even a speck compared to Betelgeuse and Antares. And these are stars in our galaxy alone. This isn't counting the ten thousand galaxies contained in only one thirteen millionth of our sky.


These reasons and many more are why the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image is the most meaningful picture to me. It drives home (to the extent that I can comprehend anyway) just how big the universe is, and how comparitively small we are. But, more importantly, it also drives home the inverse fact; no matter how insignificantly small we are, no matter how minutely microscopic we are, we still matter. We still, against all the size, the scope and the vastness of the universe - we matter, and we are significant. We mean something. We, on this one microscopic planet, in this tiny solar system, in this miniscule galaxy, that against all odds somehow supports life to the extent that it does - we, on this one planet among fifty billion, matter. We are significant. We have an existence. We have meaning.

And yet, as unfathomable as I find the universe, there is something else I find infinitely harder to understand. Something that makes me feel even more at a loss about, and these are things that go on right on our little Earth. I can't comprehend the countless number of bad, even evil, things that happen on this planet. All the negative things that don't need to be brought up, things that we all know happen frequently on a daily basis. I just don't understand it. I never will. I can't see a reason for that. For me there is no logic behind it. None whatsoever.

But - all of these negative things do serve one purpose.

They drive home the positive things, and make them shine all the brighter. They make me appreciate the good, positive occurences in this world. And the good things in this world always manage to outshine the negative, and they leave me with a  feeling that maybe, just maybe, one day, things will get better. For all of us on this planet.

This one planet among countless trillions.

That is why the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image has so much meaning for me.

Awake My Soul

Mumford & Sons

Sigh No More, 2009