Somewhere, out of reach of our senses and instrumentation, exists a realm between time and space. It is both everywhere and nowhere. A place beyond reason where an elder God sleeps and dreams the dream of our reality. It constructs with its mind all that we have known and all that ever will be known.
At a time, long ago and for an unknowable duration, this God was in a deep and dreamless slumber, but even Gods lack the luxury of a perfect night’s sleep and so it dreamt.
Like that, 13.772 billion years ago, a universe was born. Without really knowing what it was doing, the elder dreamt of the elements, laws of physics, and set everything in motion.
The forces of gravity causes clouds of dust and gas to mingle and become close, eventually forming a clump. This clump draws the gases to the center and the clump begins to flatten into a disc that starts spinning. The rotation causes the heavier materials to move toward the center creating a dense core. This core heats up until hydrogen begins to fuse.
Once fusion occurs the star is born and begins to produce helium and energy in the form of heat and light. This happened over and over again. Countless times in countless places some may never see. A rough estimate of the number of stars in our universe is 1020 or 1 billion trillion stars. Some stars are alone.
Some stars rotate around other stars as part of a solar system, while others enjoy the peace and quiet of having a solar system to themselves.
Let’s now take a moment to consider that stars are really, really cool. The sheer absurdity of the birth of a universe (be it through elder Gods dreams or by other means) and this universes ability to form stars and planets based on its laws of physics is fantastical.
As far as we know, the proper conditions for the formation of stars, planets, and life are utterly absurd.
Even if it weren’t, would it not still be beautiful? The cosmos are a brilliant spectacle and from our perspective on a tiny sphere of water and dirt no one star shines brighter than the one we call “sun.”
Our beautiful sun is 4.6 billion years old and classified as a yellow dwarf. Don’t let the word dwarf fool you because this sucker is huge. One million earths could fit inside of our sun.
Our sun is also in perpetual flaming agony, with a surface temperature of 5,500 degrees Celsius. Its noble sacrifice provides energy to every living thing on this planet in one way or another.
Plants use sunlight to photosynthesize and cats like to sleep in it. Furthermore, we are dependent on the sun and its energy, for without it, we are nothing.
The sun is heavy. It weighs about 1.99×1030 kg, which is the same as the weight of 333,060 earths combined! The sun’s giant mass makes it a leading gravitational force that prevents the planets within our solar system from spinning out of their elliptical orbits. Needless to say, the sun is extraordinary.
Something else I find incredible is the lack of respect for our sun that I have seen almost every day for the past year. The idea for this article came to me one day when I went outside to read. I sat down with my book in hand but something other than the words in the page caught my eye.
A giant flaming ball called to me from the heavens and so I looked. I stared starstunned at the orb for nearly an hour. The sun stared back at me and I felt its warmth reach through the windows of my eyes to the depths of my soul. (Disclaimer: this is a lie. I did not do this. Do not stare at the sun. It’s bad for you). I saw a celestial beauty that had been outright disrespected for the past year. I’ve heard too many people talking senseless smack about how it was too cold this winter and too hot into early spring, blaming the sun and begging it to come out when it was hidden.
People recently have been complaining about the heat and wishing the sun would shine a little less. It is too easy to forget how much the sun does for us and neglect to say, “Thank you, sun.”
I advise you to reconsider your feelings for the sun and try to appreciate its absurd existence as much as you appreciate your own absurd existence.
Even when the sun don’t shine, keep it on your mind because that dawn is sublime.