Dear human, welcome to Planet Earth. At this moment, you are probably dealing with more crucial issues, such as watching one more episode of your favourite series or seeking the perfect caption for the photo you are going to post on social media. However, given that you are reading this text, it is possible that you have some time to spare. Hence, I dare to ask for your company in a small interstellar journey.
We are currently moving at a mean distance of 27,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, in an area widely known as Orion-Cygnus Arm. It is estimated that about 300 million planets exist along with 200 to 400 billion stars in the Galaxy- only in one of the other 100 billion galaxies of the observable universe. These numbers appear to be impressive and kept only as… figments of imagination. The numerous decimal places provoke headache, while the numbers are turned into inaccessible symbols rather than something “tangible”.
This is the reason why we will attempt to touch on them with the help of some examples. Suppose that we aimed to stack one million sheets of paper on top of one another, we would get a one kilometer high tower. Likewise, supposing that we stacked one trillion sheets of paper, we would get a tower at the height of one million kilometers, which equals Jupiter’s diameter multiplied by 7! If Bill Gates aspired to save his property -which approximately amounts to 130 billion- in the form of one-dollar banknotes, he would require a warehouse with the measurements of a tennis stadium and the height of the White Tower of Thessaloniki multiplied by ten.
After that digression, let’s return to Planet Earth for a while. Nevermind the great numbers, nothing has ever markably obstructed humanity’s tendency for self-destruction. Egocentrism, delusions of grandeur, the ardent craving for power and the illusion of human as the master of the universe compose the perfect recipe for cultural decay,the deceleration of technological progress and the violation of human rights.
We do not need to travel far -not even beyond our solar system- to realize that Planet Earth is nothing more than a small dot in the vast darkness of the universe, progressively shrinking more and more as we depart, until it inevitably disappears. The universe is constantly dilated, capable of still existing without us. Nobody will ever succor and save us from ourselves. We are just a grain of sand in the vast interstellar darkness.
Nevertheless, this grain of sand, this dot is our home. It is all the hunters, all the nomads, all the daring explorers, all the leading emperors. It is all the inventors, all the scientists and philosophers that have enlightened our minds and all the artists that mesmerized our hearts. It is all the glorious civilizations and societies, the economy, the ideologies, the institutions, the cultivated values. It is the emotions that define us, love, lamentation, serenity, pain, passion.
Not only do we owe our ancestors, but also our descendants, the respect for every fellow human being without exceptions as well as the preservation of our small planet. Putting aside our selfishness and seeing beyond the tip of our “nose”, beyond our personal benefit, should suffice. We lead an ephemeral life in a remote corner of the world. We should at least beautify it. We should at least make it worthy.
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love”
– Carl Sagan, astronomer and astrophysicist.
Photography by Simeon Maniatis (@simos_maniatis)