The Cosmic Scale of Insignificance (And Why It Matters Anyway)

I fell into a conversation today about the size of stars. Not metaphorically—literally. How many of our suns could fit inside the largest known star in the observable universe?

The answer depends on which candidate you choose. Stephenson 2-18, with a radius roughly 2,150 times our sun, could contain about 10 billion suns by volume. UY Scuti, another contender, could hold around 750 million. The uncertainty itself is telling—these objects are so incomprehensibly large that our measurements come with margins of error in the hundreds of millions.

Then the conversation shifted. What about galaxies? How many of these super giant stars could fit in the smallest galaxy?

Roughly 8 billion.

Even the smallest known galaxies—tiny dwarf galaxies containing just dozens of stars spread across 20 light-years—are still about 2,000 times wider than the largest stars. That's 8 billion times larger by volume. The scale hierarchy holds: stars (even giant ones) → galaxies (even tiny ones) → galaxy clusters → superclusters. At every level, the gap is almost violently large.

The Weight of Deep Time

Spatial enormity is one thing. But then there's time.

Those ultra-faint dwarf galaxies are roughly 11 billion years old. All of recorded human history—every empire, every discovery, every conversation like this one—spans maybe 10,000 years. That's 0.0001% of those galaxies' existence. We're barely a flicker.

If you compressed the universe's 13.8 billion year history into a single calendar year, our solar system doesn't form until early September. Life on Earth appears mid-September. Dinosaurs show up on December 25th and go extinct on December 30th. All of human history—from cave paintings to moon landings to this blog post—happens in the last 30 seconds before midnight on December 31st.

We exist in the tiniest sliver at the very end of a story that's been unfolding for an almost unfathomable duration.

Stardust Observing Itself

There's a phrase I've heard that reframes all of this: humanity is little more than a bit of the universe that became able to observe itself.

Every atom in your body was forged inside a star that exploded billions of years ago. You're not separate from the cosmos—you're made of it. Recycled stellar material that somehow organized itself into consciousness.

Carl Sagan said it best: "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

For billions of years, the universe simply existed. Stars formed and died, galaxies collided, planets spun through empty space—all without anyone there to witness it. Then, in at least one tiny corner, matter arranged itself in just the right configuration to become aware. To look up and ask, "What is all this?" To build telescopes and wonder about meaning.

In that sense, we're not insignificant at all. We're the universe waking up.

The Fermi Paradox and Cosmic Loneliness

Given the sheer scale—hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone, trillions of galaxies in the observable universe—it seems almost impossible that we're the only observers. The math suggests life should emerge somewhere, many times over.

And yet, the distances make contact seem equally impossible.

The nearest star is over four light-years away. Andromeda, our nearest major galaxy, is 2.5 million light-years distant. Even if a thriving civilization exists there right now, we're seeing their galaxy as it was 2.5 million years ago—before modern humans existed. They could be looking back at Earth and seeing nothing remotely resembling civilization.

This is the Fermi Paradox: if life should be common, where is everyone?

Maybe we're surrounded by other observers, all of us looking out into the darkness and wondering if anyone else is there, while the universe's vastness keeps us forever isolated. Ships passing in an impossibly vast night, never quite overlapping in space or time.

Or maybe someday we'll detect that faint signal. The one that changes everything.

The possibility gives me chills—not in a frightening way, but with a kind of existential thrill. The idea that we might not be alone. That somewhere, another consciousness is looking up and wondering the same things.

Our Limited Time

But here's the sobering counterpoint: even on Earth, 99% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. Extinction isn't the exception—it's the rule.

We're incredibly fragile. We need very specific conditions: narrow temperature ranges, particular atmospheric composition, protection from radiation. We're vulnerable to asteroids, supervolcanoes, pandemics, and our own technologies. And we're all concentrated on one planet.

If I were betting, I'd say our time is limited.

But still—I kind of hope we find a way to persist.

Maybe that hope, even when statistically unlikely, is part of what makes us human. We're descendants of people who looked at impossible odds and tried anyway. Who crossed oceans, reached for the moon, cured devastating diseases.

There's something noble in hoping we'll endure, even while acknowledging we probably won't. That hope drives us to solve problems, to protect what we have, to reach for something beyond ourselves.

The Paradox of Significance

Here's what I keep coming back to: we're simultaneously insignificant and extraordinary.

Cosmically negligible—a brief arrangement of matter on an unremarkable planet, existing for a flash in deep time.

And yet—capable of comprehending the cosmos itself. Able to measure stars billions of light-years away, to understand our place in space and time, to hold the entire observable universe in our minds even though we occupy such an infinitesimally small corner of it.

Maybe the goal isn't to last forever. Maybe it's to be fully present for the brief time we have. To be one chapter in the universe's story of knowing itself, even if we're not the final chapter.

We got to be here, now, contemplating these questions. We get to feel that thrill at the possibility of contact, that vertigo when confronting deep time, that strange comfort in our cosmic smallness.

That's not nothing.

That might even be enough.

The most profound insights come from simply paying attention—even when what we're paying attention to is our own overwhelming insignificance in a universe that somehow produced us anyway.