Beaches

I remember being little and hearing Carl Sagan give an opening monologue in an episode of Cosmos. In his monologue he stood on a beach at sunset and the camera came closer to him and focused on his hand. In his hand he held a palm full of sand and he said, "There are more stars in the known universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world."

Sagan sputtered off some numbers which I do not remember. But I will always remember that statistic, because it seemed so amazing to me. I am struck by the vastness of that number.

Now science theorizes that the number of universes that exist exceeds the number of all the grains of sand on all of the beaches in the world. There may be an infinite number of universes.

Recently I've had an even more amazing thought. This idea requires a small re-evaluation of scale to become truly beautiful.

Imagine how many grains of sand there are on all the beaches on all of the planets circling all of the stars in all of the universes?

You might say, well, that sounds boring--I don't like sand. But, if you have ever seen a photograph of sand under magnification, you might start to think that sand is more beautiful than stars almost. I think it comes close.