I opened a bag of sugar tonight. I asked my oldest daughter to guess how many grains were in the bag; He calculated 27 million! He couldn’t even begin to contemplate how many grains of sugar make up a pound of sugar, much less everything else in the world. How fascinating and amazing is this world of bears?
There are so many unanswered questions, so many things to contemplate. How many platelets are in half a liter of blood? How many drops of water are in a cloud? How many cells make up our body? How many stars are there in the universe (known and unknown)? How many species of spiders (more are being discovered all the time)? How many blades of grass are in a field? How many grains of sand are there on a beach in the desert? Continue … How many questions about our world?
How do we find the answers to these questions? Going back to sugar, I googled it! There are apparently 17.6 million grains of sugar in a 1 kg bag! This is deduced from the size and weight of the sugar granules, starting with demerara sugar and assuming 2.2 grains of white sugar = 1 grain of demerara. It’s crazy that this question has been answered.
So can we find the answer to all our questions using the Internet? No one seems to know how many stars there are in the universe, or how many platelets there are in a pint of blood (it was thought that one would have an answer), or drops of water in a cloud, or any of the other questions. So many unanswered questions. What can we say to our children, perceptive as they are, when we kiss them good night and they look out the window and look at the stars, and quickly ask how many there are? We do something and usually tell a story and send them to sleep with a smile, as they close their eyes and think of all the fairies with lanterns flying in the night sky. Then we left his room, we pulled the door and we wondered.
You could go crazy thinking about all the unanswered questions, but there are many. The point of this article? Just to point out the wonders of our world, our universe. To reflect on the answers and make you think. There are so many unbelievably amazing facts yet to be discovered, I think sometimes we get lost in the day to day and forget the wonders of what makes our world go round, and our bodies continue to function, and our ecology sustains so much life (the only planet in the solar system – I won’t admit the universe, because I believe!). We really do live in an amazing place and we must appreciate that.
I guess you could call this a “green” item, because if we don’t take care of what we have, all these questions will go unanswered because our world will turn to dust before we have a chance. Take care of it, and these and many more questions will be answered, maybe not in our life, but we can pave the way for our children and their children and their children’s children …
As for the question of how many stars are in the universe, I still like to think of them as fairies with lanterns flying in the night sky, going about their busy lives. What you think? Do you believe in fairies?