Today’s sermon title is taken from the scripture of Monty Python. It comes from their movie The Meaning of Life - not one of their best, but with some memorable moments nevertheless. Whilst searching around for an appropriate image to include, I found this (which I rather liked)
Adam in this certainly doesn’t look pleased to see God, and I think His Creatorship is probably apologizing and telling Adam he’d run out of flesh for that bit.
But I don’t want to be accused of todger shaming and so we’ll ascribe any supposed microaggression towards Adam’s micro-penis to the delicate sensibilities of Medieval artists who, presumably, didn’t want to give Adam a third leg1.
In a footnote to my last piece I wanted to poke a bit of fun at the world’s favourite modeller and his hypocritical behaviour during the UK lockdowns. I mentioned that a typical human ejaculate has up to half a billion sperm in roughly a teaspoon’s worth.
Take a teaspoon out of the kitchen drawer. Fill it up with water from the tap (or milk if you want to preserve the imagery) and try to imagine 500 million things swimming around in it.
Verily doth the mind boggle - and our brain is not readily equipped to deal with such large numbers. So how do we get a handle on very big (or small) numbers?
Here’s another set of big numbers.
Estimates vary2 as to how much hydrogen the sun uses in every second, but a reasonable one is that it uses 300 million tons of the stuff every second.
A car weighs about a ton (OK, the average is 1.4 tons, apparently) - and the US has around 300 million cars.
So, in very rough and ready terms, every single second the sun is using up the entire US car stock as fuel.
The sun has been doing this for some 4 billion years, and we think it will carry on doing this for around another 3 to 4 billion years, before it runs out of ‘cars’.
Every second, of every day, of every month, of every year, for 7 billion years, the sun is using up the ‘cars’ of an entire huge country to power itself.
That sun thing is pretty damn big.
The numbers associated with the sun are so big we have to use other (hard to imagine) big numbers to describe it.
It gets even weirder with the sun because it’s not at all efficient. Pound for pound, if you scaled up a human being to be sun-sized, the human would be generating far more heat than the sun.
And it gets weirder still because the photons that are generated (literally the light of the sun) can take thousands of years to get from the interior to escape to us on earth. This is because the photon doesn’t get a clear path - it keeps on hitting stuff, getting absorbed and re-emitted (OK, I know, it’s wrong to think of it as the ‘same’ photon).
And, as astronomical objects go, the sun is pretty mundane.
Neutron stars, for example, are so dense that if you jumped off a wall on such a star you’d be travelling at a decent fraction of the speed of light by the time you hit the ground. And these things rotate pretty quickly too - something the size of New York might be rotating a few hundred times a second. If you could bring a sugar cube sized bit of neutron star to the earth, it would weigh about a billion tons (about 3 times the car stock of the US) - which is about the weight of a mountain.
It gets just as hard to imagine when we go very small too. ATP (Adenosine Tri-Phosphate) is the energy ‘currency’ of the body. They’re a bit like little batteries that ‘store’ the energy we get from ‘burning’ food. They’re what powers us at the micro-level. The average human cell makes more than 10 million of these things every second.
That’s just one of the amazing biochemical processes that are going on inside a cell (and the production, use, and regeneration of a single molecule of ATP is a complicated multi-step process). Human manufacturing has a long, long, long way to go before we can even begin to get close to the ‘manufacturing’ capability of a single cell.
So, a single ‘average’ cell will make something like 22 thousand trillion molecules of ATP over the course of an ‘average’ lifetime. And there are something like 30 trillion cells in a human body.
You get the idea.
It was stuff like this, and numbers like this, that made me question the ‘philosophy’ of organized religions. If you believe in a God, then he/she/it/xi/xer made all this stuff - and you’re worried about which foot to enter the bathroom with3?
Our brains, as weak and feeble as they can be, are one of the universe’s greatest creations - and big numbers can be found there too (look at the number of neuron connections - about a 100 billion neurons each connected to up to 15,000 other neurons).
And these are just numbers - big and small - that are almost impossible to fully comprehend. Things like the immune mechanisms of the human body are also kind of miraculous and complex.
We have these amazing things sitting inside our skull. Most of us don’t use them half as well as we’d like, or ought, to (myself included). But we are capable of truly amazing things - every bit as amazing as the properties of ‘exotic’ objects like neutron stars. That we have uncovered the existence of neutron stars and know a fair bit about their properties is just one testament (of very many) to the amazing universe-shaking capability we have in our heads.
I’ve probably over-used the word amazing here - but it really is an amazing thing, this walnut of wonder sitting inside our skulls.
And what do we get from our governments and institutions?
“Safe and effective”
“More antibodies”
“No one is safe until we’re all safe”
Use your noggins ladies and gentlemen (and other more exotic flavours of humanity). They are truly one of the universe’s greatest miracles - maybe the greatest.
Glory in the fact that you are capable of “doing your own research”
You owe rather a lot to that single winner of the 500 million strong sperm race.
Or maybe Michelangelo was trying to save the planet by not burning fossil fuels and so his studio was rather cold on the day his Adam model showed up
You can find sources which say 200 million tons per second and others which say 600 million tons per second. But they all seem to agree it’s something like a few hundred million tons per second.
In certain Muslim traditions it is recommended that you enter the bathroom with your left foot and exit it with your right foot. I don’t want to single out Islam here because all organized religions have similar bizarre ‘rules’.
Though I can’t remember the number, the string of Rudolf Rigger’s very interesting and informative essays remains unbroken. This is of course what I expect from a practical genius and it is why I subscribe. What I found most interesting was the reference to Michelangelo’s work of art. I had the pleasure of visiting the art gallery known as Italy in 2006 and saw the Pieta up close and personal. I was surprised by what I saw and I mentioned to my first wife that Mary’s left (?) hand seemed too large and manly. Unfortunately, my comment was not well received and I was asked who was I to criticize this master. I answered that I was just being my usual observant self. I admit that my stick persons don’t measure up but I don’t see what’s gained, other than marital peace, by denying what’s obvious. No one is perfect.
I'm reading the Quran at the moment. I can reliably assure you that the "left foot right foot" toilet thing is the most sensible thing about Islam.