Five billion tons packed within a teaspoon volume!? Incredible.
And there are stars full of this stuff. And there are stars spinning so fast its magnetic waves would rip the iron out of my blood and destroy the physics that hold my atoms together just because I am standing a few billions miles away from it.
It is absolutely humbling and make it ridiculous to think that there were men ages ago who thought the universe was created solely for human and somehow we, the sacks of meat so fragile it bursts at every miniscule amount of agitation, were "made" as some special, supreme beings in the universe and all of creations. Hilarious and sad.
Maybe turn it around. On a cosmic level, that mountain is nothing but a fluff of cottonwool, the earth a hot air balloon.
Note: This isn't an argument for god or whatever. Just thinking on scales where our "laughing in the rain" is a nightmare for ants.
It better not be. This is a proper orthodox forum.
One of my favorite mind-benders is that on some level, we embody cosmic scales of our own. The "biggest length" is our observable universe is 10^26 m. The "smallest length" is the Plank length at 10^-35 m. That puts the "middle length" at about a millimeter, or (very roughly) human scale.
To be honest though, I still don't think a creator is absolutely necessary. But I also think there is nothing wrong with the idea that there is one. I just personally don't think this creator, if exist, would belong to any of the major religion out there.
Anyway thermodynamics did it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271
Most people won't like this answer, because it's too impersonal. Thus the search for a more inspiring origin story continues. There is no drama in thermodynamics, no love, no revenge, although there are explosions.
This reminds me of this quote from Jill Tarter of SETI, particularly the last sentence:
“Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans? Whether we’re born in San Francisco or Sudan or close to the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.”
source: https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_tarter_join_the_seti_search (@ 3:02)
(I copied this nearly verbatim from another comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37061363)
"All you ever were was a little piece of the universe, thinking to itself."
It’s humbling. And we kill each other for silly reasons. We are so significant, yet so insignificant.
The crazy thing is that at a constant 1g acceleration you could get to the Andromeda galaxy in your lifetime. Andromeda might be 4 million light years away, but relativistic effects mean that only about 30 years would pass for you.
Of course, constant 1g acceleration would require an unimaginable amount of energy (and something to thrust with).
At 1.5g-s you could make it in 20.
I find it easier to comprehend in the subatomic context, picturing the space between particles like the space between stars and planets on the cosmic scale. Mash all the stars and planets together in, say, our solar system, and the entire solar system would only be about the size of the sun. Then repeat that for all the solar systems in the Milky Way, and the entire Milky Way would only be about the size of the black hole at the center. Relatively, of course!
Neutron stars are made if matter with very little empty space embedded into it. This is why they are so small.