Plato and platypus walked into a bar.. No, that is not how this story begins. This story begins with the story of The Ant man. The marvel character who can turn into a microscopic level at will. As we do not possess such powers I will help you with imagination.
Becoming an Ant-man
Imagine you became small. Small enough to so that you equal the height of an ant. And while in this form if you looked at the glass of wine in front of you It will look massive. And you climbed this glass of wine like tom cruise in a mission impossible. Now you are at the brim. And you try to grab a handful of wine, and guess what. The moment you touched the surface of wine you will be dragged into it with an enormous force. And this force Is the surface tension. Negligible force when we consider our arms strength. Yet a killer force to a tiny ant like you. You will be stuck in the wine glass unless a friendly human decided to put you out of misery.
Subatomic Ant-man
We can go a step further with imagination. Remember when the ant man 🐜 decided to go atomic level to save the world from a raging missile? Let's assume we have the ability to go subatomic. At this level if you jumped into the wine glass, you will just be a black hole if you preserve your human mass. But if your density also reduced, we could assume you will behave like a particle. Hence you will not see wine. You will see protons and neutrons with their clouds of orbiting electrons. And a vast emptiness of the liquid which we call wine. And only thing I can compare your state at this point of time is an astronaut who is floating freely in space. Assuming this is possible, and find some digestible subatomic particles, you could spend your entire time floating in the glass of wine. And I can assume the time also would shrink as the volume and you could breed generations until someone takes the glass of wine and drink it!
At this point when we come back to reality you would say, nice story! Sci-fi right?
Understanding Universe
Let's take a walk in the opposite direction. I assume you have travelled on a plane. And seen the earth from 33000 feet. And last time I travelled I saw huge evergreen container ships in Arab sea. And they were not massive at all. Infact they were tiny. Somehow my perspective has got bigger, and I could not see hundred people who were walking on the deck. Neither the waves of the see. But I see majestic clouds have become smaller and the continents which were never in my perspective now visible. I am sure this is why the billionaires tend to pay a million dollars to travel to the space station. They want to look back at us on earth and laugh how tiny we are because they do not have the imagination you and I possess, but only spare dollars. So, if a view from a space station is worth million dollars what would be the worth of a view from the edge of the milky way? Trillion quintillion dollars. Let's just do that.
Voyager has taken such a view, if you do not know there is a photograph of earth from outer edge of the solar system and boy! It's difficult to locate our earth as it is tiny. Now imagine you look back at the milky way from a distance of thousands of widths of it. What would you see? You would see nothing. Just tiny stars barely illuminate you. Hence you would be in a total darkness. If you have spent your entire life, there you would not know you have a color. But that is not the point.
Philosophy of space
The point Is that you would be just a floating particle in the emptiness. You know what else is a floating particle in the empty space called universe? It's our entire earth! And solar system. I can only compare this into what would you see if you began to float in a glass of wine at a subatomic level. Now I will give you a real question to think about when you consume your rest of the dinner.
The question goes like this, if at a fundamental level, the picture of the subatomic Antman floating in the glass of wine is comparable to us floating freely in space, how can we be sure the universe is not a f------ glass of wine?
Thank you for reading, philosophy of space.
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