The Gloaming

Day’s turning to night as my daughter and I stroll in silence, our conversation having receded with the setting sun, the only sound now the waves crashing just below our feet, wet sand between our toes, lost in our own thoughts.

I look up from the water as the stars start to poke out and immediately my mind flashes back to something I heard a long time ago – was it Carl Sagan? – along the lines that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on earth.

Looking down at the sand, trying to imagine the number that would account for each grain, or each star, my mind hits a wall. I can start by counting a square millimeter of sand, extrapolate that over a meter, then over a kilometer, then estimating the total size of beaches in the world, and extrapolating my sand-per-kilometer over that, and after all this I may derive a number that’s reasonably close, but what’s the point? I can stare at those zeroes the rest of my life and never really comprehend them. My puny little mind in my puny little body on my puny little planet rotating around a puny little star in a puny little galaxy simply is simply not equipped to even imagine something so far from anything any human has ever experienced. Can an amoeba comprehend an ant? Can an ant comprehend me? The universe is too big, and we are too small.

I remember last year, when we worked on her science project, we figured out that if Earth was the size of an orange, the Sun would be the size of a hot air balloon. As if that wasn’t incredible enough, if we separated these props so they matched, in scale, the distance between them in our solar system, we’d have to place the orange-sized earth a football field away from the Sun. And Pluto, back then still a planet, would be a little olive orbiting our Sun from 2.5 miles away. Unbelievable.

At the time, I was going to drive the point home to her with the stars as grains of sand analogy, but I thought better of it. Let her try to process the solar system first. Her nine year-old mind had been stretched quite enough for one day. A year later, I still haven’t gotten around to sharing it with her. Forgot about it, actually.

Probably because lately my mind’s been retreating from the vastness of the universe without to the vastness of the universe within. I’m studying the cell, a wondrously tiny thing. So tiny you can fit about 200 human cells in the period at the end of this sentence. Each cell is a self-contained factory synthesizing proteins, repelling invaders and multiplying, faithfully replicating a vast amount of information each time it splits. How much information? The DNA in one human cell contains 46 chromosomes, or about 30,000 genes, made up of about 3.2 billion base pairs. If expressed in book form, each human cell contains enough information to fill more than 3,500 books, each with 300 pages and each page with 3,000 characters. If you read one of these books a day, it would take you over nine years to read them all.

And all this information is tightly packed into a cell nucleus only about 0.0002 inches in diameter. It would take 5,000 of them in a line to make one inch. And as if that wasn’t tight enough, the cell nucleus manages to compress this information even further each time it divides.

If you unpacked the string of DNA in one human cell and straightened it out, you’d have a line about six feet long. If you unpacked all the DNA strands in the 100 trillion or cells in your body, you’d end up with a line that extended from the Earth to the Sun, and back, about 610 times. All in one human body.

As if this wasn’t head-spinning enough, I was just reading a speech the other day in which the speaker held his arms straight out, forming a cross with his body, and said that if his arm span represented the history of life on Earth, bacteria would, alone, occupy all the distance from his left finger tips to somewhere between his right shoulder and right elbow. Animal life wouldn’t start until we reached his right elbow and dinosaurs would rise at his right palm and die out at his last finger joint. And humans? Humans wouldn’t even appear until somewhere near the end of his last finger nail, maybe a finger nail clipping if his nails aren’t too long, with all of recorded human history occupying about one speck of dust on the edge of that finger nail.

So between the vastness of these two universes, the star-filled one outside and the molecular one inside, living a lifespan that amounts to less than a may fly’s on our scale, where does that leave us?

It’s getting cold, I notice, cold enough to yank my mind out of itself and back into the here and now. It’s completely dark too. I stop walking, and she starts, the break in my walking breaking her own reverie. I suggest we turn around.

Walking back, our pace quickens, worried that Mom will worry. We remain silent as our different-sized legs calibrate a new common walking rhythm. Once they find it, and settle in, I feel her cold little hand find mine, and I squeeze it, gently but firmly, not wanting to let it go.

“Your hands are always so warm,” she says, then, before I can say anything, she asks: “Daddy, are there more stars in the sky or grains of sand on the beach?”