Ego reduction via geochemistry

April 2002

I'm part of the whole

Knowing that my most tangible role 50 years from now will be acting as fertilizer helps me focus my attention on the here and now. As Benjamin Franklin said, "in this world nothing is certain except death and taxes." I have finally accepted that I am not immortal, a fact that has taken taken a half century to internalize.

As I try to figure out my role in the great scheme of things, my background in geochemistry continues to shrink my ego. I've passed the midpoint of my personal existence, even if the atoms of my body, dust of a supernova explosion, have another perspective. After all, my lifetime represents about 1/100 millionth or less of their existence1. I've been humbled before, but to realize that my proper atoms view all my life's accomplishments as equivalent to not even a bump on an intercontinental highway2 makes my ego so small that I can walk upright under closed doors.

If being humbled by the age of my atoms isn't enough, I've been looking at space photos from the Hubble telescope where galaxies appear as numerous as raindrops in a heavy storm. As each of these galaxies has on the order of 100 billion stars, our sun, if it were a grain of sand, would be one grain on the surface of a beach that stretches for a few million kilometers, equivalent to the beaches of several Earths.3

I am one six-billionth of humanity. Returning to the beach analogy, I'm a grain of sand on a beach on 6, 000 square meters of beach, or roughly a football field's length of beach. After the star abundance calculation, I'm swelled with self-importance. All is relative.

With these calculations, I have an inkling of my true worth: as close to nothing as one can be in the great scheme of things. Let's say that being equivalent to zero gives me a problem in self-worth. I'm not alone. After all, think of all the money spent on self-help and empowerment books that is essentially wasted from this perspective.

Another way of looking at the situation is that I'm a part-albeit tiny-of global geochemical cycles and the evolution of the universe. Poets have sensed this for centuries, including John Donne ("No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main...." 1624), and Walt Whitman ("Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself [I am large, I contain multitudes]. 1855).

I'll try not to let this fact of being one with the universe go to my head, but then false modesty is a sin.

1Apparently many of my atoms were created in a supernova about 6 billion years ago. Sixty years goes into 6 billion years a 100 million times. This is an underestimate as a large proportion of my atoms are hydrogen, with an age of 12 to 20 billion years; therefore the average age of my atoms is more than 6 billion years.

2Let's say the highway is 6,000 km (3,600 miles) long. This is equivalent to 6 million meters or 600 million centimeters. A fraction of 1/100 million would be 6 cm or a little over 2 inches long.

3Let's say that a grain of sand occupies 1mm2, equivalent to a million per square meter of beach surface. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, would cover 100 billion/million per square meter or 100,000 square meters (0.1 km2). For a beach a 100 meters wide (a football-field length), this would be a kilometer long. Now just extend that for a few million galaxies, as a starter, and you have a beach a few million kilometers long. The coastline of Brazil is about 7,000 kilometers long. My guess is that the world's beaches must extend less than 100 times the coastline of Brazil; hence the total length of beaches should be several times length of earth's beaches.
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