Of Sea turtles and Galaxies

The most incredible sight that I have ever seen was two years ago at the Jurabi Turtle Center in Western Australia. Zoom into the map below, and you'll see how it is properly desolate from the lights and noise of human activity.


View Jurabi Turtle Centre in a larger map

Incidentally, what I saw had nothing to do with turtles. It was a sight in the sky that caught me unaware. After being shown a slide show on sea turtles, our group was taken to the beach. It was a moonless night, and we were told to turn off our cellphones and any sources of artificial light to avoid disturbing the turtles. But our eyes adjusted quickly to the starlight and we could just about distinguish the dark rocks and shrubs from the white sand. It was nesting season, but it took a while to find a turtle that came ashore to lay its eggs. After sneaking around for a few minutes and speaking only in whispers, the guide had us sit down on the beach while she scouted ahead to find a turtle. So I lay down on my back, and stared at the stars. I whispered around to the group when a troop of baby turtles crawled over my arms and towards the surf. It felt bizarre watching minute-old newborns not just taking their first steps, but running for their dear lives towards the relative safety of the ocean. After the excitement passed, I focused back at the stars. This was the clearest sky I had ever seen, being completely devoid of the air pollution that civilization creates. I noticed how some stars were peculiarly clumped together. They were more dense in some places than others. As my eyes adjusted to the vastness of the sky, I noticed that the clumps were close to each other and formed a line that went straight across the sky. And in a wondrous moment it hit me - Holy shit! That's the Milky Way!.


I wanted to shout it out, but I couldn't. So I whispered it to my younger sister sitting next to me. And instead of sharing my astonishment, all she could say was that she didn't want to acknowledge the vastness of space, because she felt it made humans less significant. And as a doctor, she was afraid to depreciate her value for human life. I scoffed at her. She couldn't spoil my moment, and I wasn't in the mood to start off a debate on how the vastness of space makes humans less significant. In fact, I see it as quite the opposite. As far as we know, humans are the only beings that can even comprehend the vastness of space. It makes me proud of how far humanity has come in understanding our Universe, but humble in how much we have left to discover. Yes, the Universe once made me feel insignificant, but it is an unavoidable truth that I eventually got used to, after a few existential crises. It's like gradually recovering your confidence after being tragically dumped by your lover.

So for my little sister, I want to once again emphasize the vastness of our Universe using the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image taken back in 2004. On September 24th, 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope, which revolves around Earth, was pointed to a seemingly empty spot in the sky which is just one-tenth the diameter of the full moon as viewed from Earth, or roughly a 13-millionth of the total area of the sky. At a quick glance, the spot looks completely black because there appear to be no stars from our galaxy that occupy this tiny area. So anything that can be seen in this area should be outside the Milky Way. Hubble collected the minuscule amounts of light from as far as 13 billion light-years away, for the next 4 months, and on January 16, 2004, the following was the result.


Except for a few faint stars from our galaxy, every single spot in this image is another galaxy. And the count comes to more than 10,000 in this single image. If we extrapolated this number evenly across the sky, and take into account the flatness of the Universe, then we can estimate that there are at least 100,000,000,000 galaxies (A hundred billion), each containing billions of stars, and each star potentially having a planetary system of its own. And that's only in our visible neighborhood of the Universe.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it... for a few days, or a few years, or however long it takes to put it into context.