6 August

This is a very common thing, to point out the vastness of the universe and how insignificant we are, in it. But it’s wrong. This is the ultimate mind-twister, the root of our culture we don’t understand. If you bother to read it, you may think ‘wtf?!’ at least once. Space and time are not containers we live inside. They’re measurements of travel, not features of the world. If I say London is ‘far away’, that’s not a feature of the world. That’s entirely a feature of my method of travel. For example, 100 years ago London was even further away. It would have taken me 6 weeks to get there, by boat. Now it takes a day. It’s closer. You could say yes, but it’s always been about 20,000 km away. But a km is a human construct, relative to the size of our bodies and our measuring instruments, and our methods of travel. It’s not the baseline measurement of the world itself. Big and small are *entirely* relative terms. Not absolute terms. For a microbe on a blade of grass in your backyard, the distance from that blade of grass to your local shops is relatively equivalent to the distances we’re talking about in these astronomical images. So which ‘vast’ distance is the ‘correct’ one here? Neither is correct. Both are vast distances, for their relative contexts. But distance itself isn’t a feature of the world, it’s the expression of a relationship. Space and time are relationships between things, not measurements that sit outside those things.