This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
Imagine yourself on a beach
You watch waves break relentlessly onto wet sand.
On the tip of your finger, you hold a single grain. It’s barely big enough to span one of the ridges of your fingerprint.
In that grain of sand, there are approximately thirty million billion atoms.
Now you look in both directions, up and down the length of the whole beach. Any effort to contemplate the vast number of grains of sand on this one beach, out of all the beaches in the world, makes your head hurt a little bit.
Now the sun is setting, and the first stars are winking through the cobalt dome of sky.
You wait until it is completely dark, with no moon, and you see the hazy band of the Milky Way stretch from horizon to horizon.
You’ve been told there are hundreds of billions of stars in our own galaxy, and trillions of galaxies in the known universe.
It turns out most of those stars have planets. How many of those planets have beaches, and sand?
More than all the grains of sand on this beach right here.
You know it’s useless, you know that your mind cannot possibly hold these numbers in any meaningful way.
But you try.
And while you try to comprehend the vastness of the observable universe, you start to wonder about the unobservable universe. You start to wonder how wide it really is, beyond the reach of the light that has made it all the way to our own sandy rock in the last thirteen some odd billion years.
It might go on forever. There may not be a number large enough to represent the totality of galaxies, and stars, and grains of sand in the universe beyond our observation.
Why do this? Why stand on that beach, and peer at that grain of sand, and look up at the glittering night sky to wonder at the vastness beyond comprehension?
Because it is good to think about infinity. It stretches the soul, damages it in ways that help it grow. Just as rigorous exercise tears our muscles to help them get stronger.
You can never truly comprehend the infinite. But you can always try.
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