You Are Here

You woke up this morning with thoughts in your mind. What should I wear? What’s for breakfast? Is everyone mad at me today? You have thoughts right now, reading this. Important thoughts, fleeting thoughts. Thoughts that are yours. You exist. You matter. You are the centre of your experience. You are here.

The ground beneath you is real. Feel it. Ancient granite and limestone, sand, and silt, and clay compressed over millennia into something solid enough to hold you. Air and water and the decomposed bodies of your fellow plants and animals folded in until it was fertile enough to feed a civilization. You are part of that civilization.

Right now, you’re somewhere on Earth, a planet 12,742 kilometres in diameter, rotating at about 1,000 miles per hour at the equator, though you don't feel the force of it. There are approximately eight billion other humans here with you, each the protagonist of their own story, each one convinced of their own reality just as deeply as you are convinced of yours. Your country, wherever it is, is one of about 195. Your city is one of thousands, or millions if you count every village and town. If you wanted to see all of it, literally every square meter of Earth's surface, it would take at least 30,840 years. Or you could spend just one day in each city. That would take 27 years.

Earth, that planet you call home, orbits the Sun, a fairly ordinary, middle-aged, yellow dwarf star. The Sun is 1.3 million times the volume of Earth. You could fit about 20 octillion human bodies inside the Sun, if you liquefied them. That’s a 2 followed by 28 zeros. The Sun itself is one of somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

The Milky Way, a barred spiral galaxy about 105,000 light-years across. Light, travelling at 186,282 miles per second, takes 105,000 years to cross it. You, travelling at highway speed, take about 900 billion years. Though the fuel cost would be enormous. And you would die.

The Milky Way is part of the Local Group, “local” being 10 million light-years wide. It’s one of at least 60 galaxies. The Local Group is one of hundreds of groups in the Laniakea Supercluster. The Laniakea Supercluster is one of millions of superclusters in the observable universe.

The observable universe, different from the actual universe, which may be infinite, is 93 billion light-years across. It contains at least 100 billion galaxies. Probably more. Each galaxy contains millions or billions or trillions of stars. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all of Earth’s beaches. Many of those stars even have planets.

You will be alive for perhaps thirty more years. Forty. Maybe seventy if you’re lucky. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Anatomically modern humans, like you, have existed for about 300,000 years. The civilization you’re part of has been around for about 10,000. Your entire species occupies 0.002% of the history of the universe. Your life, personally, occupies 0.0000006% of it, give or take.

Humans are such wonderfully complex creatures.

Your body contains approximately 7 × 10^27 atoms.

The observable universe contains an estimated 10^80. You represent almost 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000007% of the matter in the observable universe.

The volume of your body is about 0.07 cubic meters. The volume of the observable universe is about 4 × 10^80 cubic meters. You occupy 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002% of space. I had to count those zeros. There are seventy-nine of them.

Everything you have ever experienced has occurred in the last few decades on a single planet orbiting a single star in one galaxy among trillions, during a blink of cosmic time so brief that to the universe it was hardly significant at all.

The sum total of human experience - every battle, every great film, every scientific discovery, or broken record, every act of cruelty and kindness - has happened in this one small world, and will eventually be erased so completely that it will be as if it never happened. The Earth will be consumed by its star. The stars will burn out. The galaxies will drift apart. And no human as we know them will be left to remember that you were here, or that anything was here, or that here ever meant anything at all.

You're sitting in the woods right now, with a child who didn't exist before, using words someone created to let a stranger see their thoughts. You had pancakes for breakfast. Your jeans are dark, your cardigan is worn and soft. You have an imagination that can conjure worlds. It's temporary. But it’s not meaningless.

You are in your mind.

You are on Earth.

You are here.

You are here.

You are