My friend Brett shared one of those meme graphic things today which said, "No One Is You And That Is Your Power" and I know it is true because I have had thoughts about the same thing for years. The Hubble telescope did the science (proof) for me so I did not have to.

The following image is from the Hubble deep field survey of the "sky". The image show a small slice of the "sky" sphere. If you were to look at that spot in the night sky you could easily cover it with the finger nail on you little finger, held at arm's length. It is a very small bit of sky.

Hubble Only One You

It appears to be loaded with stars. Actually, the stars are mostly the brighter white, blue, or dimmer red, ones with the difracton crosses. Most of the other "spots" are actually galaxies. The next image shows a small slice taken from the first image and enlarged. You can see more of the individual galaxies at this resolution.

Hubble Slice Only One You

Now our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains an estimated 100 thousand million stars. That is a bunch. And our galaxy is one of the smaller ones. And there are an estimated billion billion galaxies in the part of the universe we can actually "see" with the help of Hubble and a couple of other deep field telescopes we have out there in space. And there is more universe we cannot see (yet) beyond that.

You can do the math if you like (your calculator will likely get an overflow error) but you should be able to see without doing so that there are a LOT of stars out there.

Research over the last few years suggests there are more stars with planets than without and, once again based on calculations, that means that there is, more likely than not, life on a bunch of those planets. The numbers are so huge that it is almost certain that there is other intelligent life out there, maybe even bipedal five-fingered "people" that use the decimal system.

The thing is that in all of those planets, around all of those stars, in all of those galaxies -- and that's just the ones we know about -- there is only one YOU! That's right. YOU are the most unique thing in the universe.

And Brett is surely right. (Thanks, Brett!)

back to top

Meet Brett At Her Practicing Presence Website

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *