The Inward Abyss
We are accustomed to being impressed by the night sky. The sheer number of stars in the Milky Way is enough to unsettle the mind. Astronomers estimate that our galaxy contains somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars. Even the lower figure strains belief. If you tried to count them one by one at a rate of one star per second, you would still be counting three thousand years from now.
And yet the truly destabilizing comparison is not outward, but inward.
A single human cell contains on the order of ten trillion to one hundred trillion atoms. At one atom per second, counting the atoms in just one cell would take hundreds of thousands to millions of years. That is not metaphor. It is arithmetic.
Now widen the frame.
The human body as a whole contains roughly one octillion atoms, that is 10²⁷. If you began counting them today at one per second, you would continue for roughly 31 quintillion years. That span is more than two billion times the current age of the universe.
The mind hesitates here. The numbers are not symbolic. They are derived from mass, chemistry, and Avogadro’s constant. They are sober estimates. Yet they feel mythic.
What makes this more than numerical spectacle is the fact that these atoms are not drifting in chaos. They are arranged. Oxygen forms water and breath. Carbon forms the latticework of living structure. Hydrogen moves through every reaction. Nitrogen encodes memory in spirals of DNA. Out of this vast assembly arises perception, language, longing.
We tend to think of ourselves as small beneath the cosmos. In one sense that is true. A single star dwarfs us in mass and scale. But in another sense, the inward depth rivals the outward expanse. The body contains more individual components than our galaxy contains stars.
The abyss exists in both directions.
The night sky teaches distance.
The human body teaches magnitude.
Between them stands a thinking creature, composed of uncountable atoms, contemplating the stars, whose number pales in comparison to the magnitude of the being who beholds them.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Origin: The phrase “Put that in your pipe and smoke it” dates back to the early 19th century. It alludes to the thoughtful appearance of pipe smokers, suggesting the person should go away and “contemplate” what they’ve just been told.
First Recorded Use: It is recorded as early as 1824 in R.B. Peake’s comedy Americans Abroad. It was also popularized by writers like Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers (1836).
Usage: While once common, it is now considered old-fashioned or humorous.
To gain an actual understanding of such near impossible grand numbers is indeed mind-boggling. Now, I used to put something in that pipe to smoke it and try to think about such mind-blowing stuff but now instead of spraining my brain with such things, I just accept it as math doesn't lie. It's how I treat the concept of God/The Universe........I just accept it because belief in something that humongous sits alright with me. Faith is a funny thing when compared to facts.....yet for me someone they also go hand in hand. Yin and Yang. But that doesn't mean I'll have faith in just any ol' thing. Critical thinking if vital, but faith in something I've thought about for decades, felt it in my soul (science can't measure those things), just works right for me.
Reading this, I kept hearing Whitman: “I contain multitudes.” The arithmetic is staggering, but what moves me most is the reminder that the immensity isn’t only above us — it’s within us.