Friday, April 10, 2009

Miracles

If you think about it, the most interesting place in the solar system is… Earth, hands down. It is home to to a level complexity and organization that is simply unfathonable. I mean compared to the deserts of Mars or the clouds of Jupiter, Earth is like finding a jumbo jet full of ipods in the middle of the Sahara. (Another amazing thing is is it got there because that’s just what sand does given enough time, but I’ll talk more about that later.)
That analogy doesn’t do it justice though, not in the slightest. Biolgical diversity and complexity is.. well it’s unreal. Your brain alone has… get this.. no you can’t, and neither can I but it’s 500 trillion connections. The number is higher at a younger age topping 1*10^15 or 1 quadrillion connections at age 3. This number is over 71 thousand times the age of the universe in years. And that’s the age of well, everything. And it’s more than the number of stars in our galaxy. 10,000 times the number of stars in our galaxy.
We are each a miracle in the truest sense of the word.

3 comments:

Becca said...

Sounds like you've been reading Carl Sagan recently...

JP said...

Uh no. But read all his books at 16. I've only heard people talk like this in science and religious circles.

Becca said...

That's funny, its been a while since I've read Carl Sagan, but that entry reads a lot like what I remember the introduction to pale blue dot..