Some years ago, I read that we have billions of creatures living in our mouths – as many as there are people on Earth. They belong there. It is their home. The billions of tiny creatures that live in your mouth haven’t the slightest idea that you exist.
We human beings constitute well over seven billion creatures living on this Planet Earth. This planet weighs over six sextillion tons. A sextillion is a billion times a billion times a thousand. I calculate – correct me if I’m wrong – that if each and every person on this planet – every man, woman, child and infant – went on an eating binge and ate a million tons every second, it would take us over forty thousand years to consume the entire planet. Compared to the Earth, we are tiny. In fact, ants and termites in Africa alone weigh over twenty-five times as much as all of humanity. Furthermore, the microscopic creatures that live in the environment – and in our own bodies – weigh more than all the visible life-forms on this planet put together.
Huge as the Earth is relative to ourselves, it is dwarfed by the sun – which weighs over a million times as much as the Earth. And the mass of the sun is less than a trillionth the mass of the galaxy of stars it is a part of. And there are over a trillion galaxies in the cosmos.
We are tiny creatures.
Proud little tiny creatures.
We are proud of our ability to look out into the vastness of the cosmos and proclaim our knowledge of what is and of what is not.
A few years ago – a year being the amount of time it takes for our tiny planet to go all the way around our tiny sun – we discovered that ninety-five percent of the mass in the cosmos is invisible to us. We call it “dark matter”. This dark matter is almost all of what is in the physical world. We just discovered it. How smart we are! Now we know what most of the world is made of. Right?
But then we discovered “dark energy”. We call it “dark energy” because we don’t know what it is. Seemingly, dark energy is most of what exists – and dark matter is most of what’s left.
If we haven’t learned humility, we have learned nothing.
We live in a vast cosmos, and know almost nothing about it. The little we do know seems like a lot because it’s so much more than we knew yesterday. But it still does not occur to us that we may know as little about the world we live in as the tiny creatures who inhabit our mouths know about theirs.
9-Dhu al-Hijjah-1432 / 12 Dhu-al-Hijjah 1441
November 5, 2011 / August 2, 2020
Which Way Is Up? 