How Significant Are We?

As a business reporter, I handle the large numbers such as million or billion usually together with dollars or RMB yuan. These numbers are still indirectly related our lives as the business cycle can have a great influence on our lives. But if they come with years, they can so easily blow away my thought…

These great numbers have been associated to years these days as there were many news stories about Prof. Stephen Hawking’s recent visit to my part of the world, namely Hong Kong and Beijing. Although I haven’t read A Brief History of Time or any other works by this beloved physicist, I at least have pondered a lot about the beginning of time. That led me to write my most recent poem Glad to See You Again...After Billions of Years.

It is awfully difficult to see the relationship between our mundane lives and an almost unimaginable time span of billions of years. The earth is supposed to be around 4.6 billion years old (if you don’t subscribe to the Fundamentalist Christian theory that our planet was created in the year 4004 BCE). And our species started cultivation of earth and became completely distinct from other creatures only around ten thousand years ago. (Some anthropologists say that the expulsion of Adman and Eve from Eden symbolises the human beings' transition from hunters/gathers into farmers.) If we suppose the earth were 24 hours old, the human history would only be a bit more than three minutes.

But the age of our planet is only a fourth to a third of the entire universe's. If we shrank the 14 billion years of time after the Big Bang into a day, our history would be as short as six milliseconds! Then each person's life span would be only 0.06 milliseconds at longest… It is much shorter than a virus’ lifespan in comparison to ours. (A SARS virus can live up to 15 days in blood, according to Chinese scientists.)

I don’t exactly know what kind of significance such a calculation has to our lives. Shall we think that even our biggest problem is utterly insignificant in the long, long history of the universe? It may help. But can thinking that our lives are even less significant than viruses’ empower us? Probably not.

Then how about thinking this way? We can perceive the enormity of the universe despite our utter smallness. And at least on this planet, we are the only creatures of God that dare to try understanding the entire history of the time… It expands our potential, doesn’t it? It makes me feel better, at least…