I opened a bag of sugar tonight. I asked my oldest daughter to guess how many beans were in the bag. She guessed 27 million! She couldn’t even begin to contemplate how many grains of sugar make up a pound of sugar, no matter what else in the world. How fascinating and amazing is this world of ours?
There are so many unanswered questions, with so many things to contemplate. How many platelets in a pint of blood? How many drops of water 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 and more are being discovered)? How many blades of grass are in a field? How many grains of sand on a beach, in the desert? Continue…. How many questions about our world?
How do we find the answers to these questions? Getting back to sugar, I googled it! There are apparently 17.6 million grains of sugar in a 1kg bag! This is inferred by the size and weight of the sugar granules starting with demerara sugar and assuming 2.2 grains of white sugar = 1 grain of demerara. 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 are in the universe, or how many platelets are in a pint of blood (one thought 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, no matter how perceptive they are, when we kiss them goodnight and they look out the window and look at the stars, quickly asking how many there are? We make something up and usually tell a story and send them off to sleep with a smile, as they close their eyes and think of all the fairies with lanterns flying in the night sky. We then left his room, opened the door and wondered.
You might go crazy thinking about every unanswered question, but there are so many. The point of this article? Just to point out the wonders of our world, our universe. To reflect on what has no answer, and make you think. There are so many phenomenally 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 tick tock, and our ecology supports so much life (the only planet on the solar system – I will not admit the universe, because I believe!). We really do live in an amazing place and we have to appreciate that.
I guess you could call this a “green” article, 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 get the chance. Take care of it, and these and many more questions will be answered, maybe not in our lifetime, 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 there in the universe, I still like to think of them as fairies with lanterns flying in the night sky, with their busy lives. What do you think? Do you believe in fairies?