Singularity

There's a great episode of The Simpson's where Homer gets elected as head of the Sanitation Department in Springfield.  His basic game plan is to spend unlimited amounts of money with absolutely no thought of the consequences.  He wins office with the campaign slogan: "Can't someone else do it?"  This is my kind of slogan.  This would be an excellent life slogan.

"We cannot fully understand the universe - the simple fact is that we cannot even define space or time.  They are both boundless, in spite of all we can do to limit them.  We live in a box of space and time, which we have manufactured by our own minds and on that depends all our so-called knowledge of the universe."

I tried to look up the speed at which our universe is expanding but I couldn't even grasp what the experts were talking about, and I've taken university level physics classes.  Let's just say the universe is moving, like Ferrari moving.  Apparently the farther away you get from earth it expands more slowly while it's also accelerating more rapidly  . . . or vice versa . . . or something else.  The words parsec or gigaparsec come up frequently.  Assuming that a parsec is something so big that I can't comprehend what it means the fact that someone is measuring something so large they have to add the qualifier giga- to it is a further be-goggling. Meanwhile, the universe is estimated to be 93 billion light years in diameter which means if you travel at the speed of light it would take you 93 billion years to traverse the diameter of the universe.  This is further than the distance between Parsippiny and Ossining.  

This is space.  Don't get me started on time which is never ending and started with the Big Bang.  What the fuck is the Big Bang?  It sounds like they asked a class of first graders to name the start of time.  And how about the number one trillion?  It gets tossed around all the time like it's a Nerf football and we can't really even grasp what that means, either.  For instance, one trillion dollar bills would stack up to a height of almost 68,000 thousand miles.  If you switch to $100 bills the pile would be 680 miles.  Think about it!  Waffer thin $100 bills stacked one on top of the other 680 miles straight up.  I'd be happy to get a couple of miles of $100 bills.  Very happy.

I got started on all of these unknowable concepts after reading some suggestions on how to deal with newcomers who were resistant to the concept of a Higher Power.  Look, we get it - it's hard to develop faith in an unfathomable concept.  Please just give it a whirl.  When our national debt is announced you don't break your brain trying to understand it.  You've accepted it.

I'm going to throw that equation in just for the hell of it.