WHERE ARE WE

By: Liam Odynsky

When you look think of space, what do you think of? Do you think of alien life? Strange planets? Maybe you think of beautiful stars or galaxies? The universe is infinite, so any of these are possible.

Look at our beautiful universe, our many galaxies and planets. I say that it our universe for one reason, and one reason alone. We live here, and the country you live in you consider “your” country too, do you not? We see it as ours, even though we are only one infinitesimal planet in a vast and infinite galaxy. But there is one thing that sets earth apart from the rest of the planets.

We are home to advanced life-forms, and all sorts of them, there are us, the humans, fish, birds, and many, many more. We are spectacular and unique in that way, the way us and the other beings of earth have not only been shaped by our planet, but also shaped it back in return. Look around, there are not many places untouched by us, we have clear-cut forests, chopped the tops off mountains, dug tunnels deep into the earth. We have even long postponed another ice age with our pollution.

Now I ask you to look back out to space again, does it not make all we’ve done feel insignificant? Look at how far it goes on for, it goes on literally forever. Practically none of that has been touched by mankind. Look at the stars at night, each of those hundreds of times bigger that our sun, most with more planets orbiting it than our sun. Look at how many of those there are, more than we could count in a hundred human lifetimes, a thousand even. Do we seem so powerful now, now that you realize that all of humanity and our planet is as small in comparison to the universe as a single germ dying is to a blue whale? Now that you know all of everything we’ve ever known could be destroyed in one second by a single asteroid?

With the universe being this vast and unpredictable, and human kind advancing as it is, how long until we try to make ourselves significant in this universe?