[Editor Dan here: Ethan first delivered a talk on this topic in 2021, at the yearly event he puts on called Wonder Wander. Since that talk, I’ve witnessed Ethan’s thinking on this topic develop (if you enjoy the essay below, here are two prior musings from Ethan on this topic: 1, 2).
I’m grateful to Ethan for tuning the needle of my attention away from my culturally-constructed suffering (e.g. I’m not productive enough, too fat, too old etc.), and towards the primary reality that we are tiny miraculous beings atop a blue-green ball, floating in the vast empty void of space. I hope Ethan’s words stoke as much wonder in your soul as they have in mine.]
One of the most wondrous things to think and feel is that we’re on a tiny blue-green ball of life cruising the void of space.
It’s easy to get caught up in the human contrivances: work, bills and taxes, maintenance of all the stuff we have, technologies that hook our attention, advertising everywhere we look reminding us of what we don’t have etc. But the above all truth is that we’re tiny little beings having an incredibly visceral, rich, entrancing experience of living on a tiny little space rock covered in life.
There is so much space out there. So much nothingness. And that we get to be on this little life covered planet with an atmosphere that burns up asteroids like a force field and lends us our every breath is a true wonder.
Does the incredulousness of it all ever cross your mind?
Sometimes, say Tuesday morning at 10:37am, I’m at work and life feels a little flat, and I pause to contemplate our place in space. I’ll fly my imagination out above of my head, above whatever building I’m in, above the city, above the state, above the country, above the continent, above the planet, look back at Earth as I pass by the moon, see our “Pale Blue Dot” from Saturn, look back at our Sun from a neighboring star, see our star cluster in an arm of the Milky Way, the Milky Way among other spiraling galaxies, strain to see as many of those spiraling galaxies as I can in my mind’s eye, and then run it in reverse all the way back into my noggin.
That always stokes the wonder of it all for me.
Other times, I’m pedaling my bicycle down the street and remember “up” is not really up, but out. Up is just away from the ball of the Earth, and there is actually no up or down in the universe! Then, I’ll start to feel that I’m not pedaling my bicycle in this flat, up-down, map-like concept of wherever I am, but on any arbitrary side of a ball in space, and I’ll laugh and pedal and marvel at how everything seems so “normal” to me when it absolutely is not – we just have endless capacity to get used to it.
Have you heard the latest estimates for the number of galaxies in the universe? We used to guess there were 100-200 billion galaxies, but as our tools and techniques get better, the observable universe continues to grow. Estimates are now between 2 and 20 trillion galaxies!
For context, we estimate that our Milky Way Galaxy has 100 - 400 billion stars in it. The sun being one of those 100 - 400 billion stars in our galaxy. And now we think there are trillions of these galaxies… It’s nuts.
Do you know when the idea of galaxies was adopted by humanity?
About a hundred years ago, largely to the credit of Edwin Hubble, who the Hubble Telescope was named after. The Hubble Telescope so fittingly captured my favorite photograph of space that I feel gives the best sense of the size of the universe yet, picturing 10,000 of those estimated “2-20 trillion” spiraling galaxies:
One of the highest tasks of creatives and artists, I believe, is to keep the collective dream of humanity in accord with the ground on which we live and dream. And folks, it turns out the ground upon which we live and dream is a tiny miracle hurling through the endless void of space.
Being alive on Earth is a wondrous miracle, but we humans have endless capacity to get lost in the things we make for ourselves — in the busyness of our heads, culture, and systems — so much so that we can be and often are totally blind to the incredulous reality in which we actually live.
Boundless wonder is found in figuratively living with one foot in our human world, and the other outside of it, beyond society, culture, and all the human things, in the primary miraculousness of the world which, as Ed Abbey once wrote, “sustains the little world of man, as sea and sky sustain a ship.”
Hello! I’m Ethan, a creative stoked on curiosity and wonder ever-so-grateful to be here and now on a planet covered in life cruising the void of space. I write about things I find interesting, useful, and profound at ethanmaurice.com where you can also subscribe to my monthly Late Night Letters or order a $1 ‘In This Together’ Bumper Sticker for stoking the collective awareness of our intrinsic planetary togetherness.