Universes

I'm not sure where I heard this, but I think it was from a movie or TV show when I was a kid. There are a couple of hippie types smoked out of their minds wondering "If there are universes of planets and creatures living under our fingernails" while the other surmises that if there are then "are we just part of a universe under something elses' fingernail?"

The point was that those, like me, who frequently ponder the big questions of who we are and how did we get here, must consider how much of a role perspective plays. To an ant - their ant hill is their nation and maybe their whole world. They may know there are other nations or ant hills, but do they understand the concept of "earth" and it's place within the solar system? I would guess that they cannot begin to fathom the concept of our planetary universe.

Therefore, while we humans have a decent understanding of all the rocks in space we are lumped with, undoubtedly we are missing something and I see no reason to discount the possibility that our universe, as we know it, could be a tiny part of something unimaginably bigger.

Likewise, the passage of time, the millions of years that humans have taken to reach this state (and start exploring other rocks in space), is just a fleeting moment in the real scheme of things. If our universe is just an expanding explosion then certainly what we consider to be permanence, is only a minuscule sliver in time of something much grander than we can even imagine.

Yes, I think about these things often, which could explain my frequent headaches. All this morning hypothesising comes after reading Olivia Johnson's latest article.