Who Do You Think You Are? I Will Tell You.

Ever been asked, “Who do you think you are?” Well . . . here is one answer. You are what happened when a few trillion atoms came together with a design and a purpose, which was to create YOU! That arrangement was unique in the universe and highly ordered and specialized.
It happened only ONCE. It will never exist again. For a few decades, these atoms that some think are entirely random (!) will follow a plan of cooperation that we call “life.” That plan will keep you whole, and give you the capacity to engage with other life in its myriad of forms and expressions wherever you go in this world . . . or beyond it, programmed by a primary impulse that will override all others to keep you alive, well and happy.

You may feel quite average, but you are in fact an incredible and amazing specimen. You contain within your body somewhere around 7 X 10 to the 18th power joules of kinetic (potential) energy—enough to explode with the power of thirty massive Hydrogen bombs. (Einstein demonstrated that mass equals energy, and this is what your mass converts to in energy.) In fact, the creation that is YOU explains how a large star can burn for billions of years without using up its’s energy.  You are a mighty miracle of power and subtlety.

Einstein also showed the world that the two things without which we cannot conceive of much of anything, much less even ourselves, are not absolutes at all. SPACE and TIME he said, are relative to the OBSERVER and to the THING BEING OBSERVED. Your only limitation is the speed of light. Stephen Hawking even went so far as to say that it is not actually proper to refer to SPACE and TIME, for in fact both exist as SPACETIME and are “inextricably connected.” This has also been termed the “Doppler Shift.” (Think of a police siren getting “louder” as it nears you, then fading after it passes.)

This thing we call “YOU” lives in a very large place: a universe filled with galaxies — perhaps 150 billion of them. (If galaxies were peas, their mass could fill a basketball arena.) What is even more astounding is that the universe is not only expanding, but some physicists have thought that it’s rate of expansion is in fact increasing! In all of the vast expanse of the universe, you have been placed in a very select place, and in fact, the only spec of matter in which you could survive. You are on a ball of dirt, air, water and rock that is at the precise distance from a sun so as to keep you alive and neither freeze nor incinerate you. If you were just one percent farther from the sun or five percent closer, you would either burn or freeze. Not only that, but just four percent of your home planet is a survivable element for any of us. Our planet has a moon without whose magnetic influence our planet would wobble us into oblivion. There are ninety-two naturally existing elements on Earth, and your body is the perfect selection, blend, and proportion of these to create the wonder of your human body, a wonder that modern science is amazingly far from really understanding.  Above us is an atmosphere that efficiently absorbs the assault of massive waves of cosmic radiation, ultraviolet rays and charged particles that would spell our painful demise without atmospheric protection. In all of this vast universe, there is but one tiny spot in a galaxy called the Milky Way called Planet Earth that can sustain you.

Now comes the even more mind-blowing task of understanding all this on an atomic level. Two or more atoms joined comprise a molecule. Something the size of a pencil eraser contains about 40 billion molecules. How many times does that volume divide into our world . . . our galaxy the Milky Way . . . or our universe?  Are there numbers large enough.  These atoms never die. They recycle at death. It has been suggested that up to a billion atoms that constituted Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, or Moses have found their place in your physical body. A billion more came from Beethoven. And you thought you didn’t matter and were just a nobody in this universe!  Not even close, my magnificent and important friend.

This is all possible because atoms are very small. Imagine a line equal to the thickness of a pin. Now divide that line into a thousand parts. Each of those lines would be one MICRON long. The creature called a Paramecium is two microns long. To see this little guy swimming along, you would have to enlarge the drop of water in which he was moving until it was about a dozen meters across. But, if you wanted to see the atoms in that same tiny bit of water, the drop would have to be made much bigger . . . . about fifteen miles bigger! That is the nature and size of atoms. They exist on a scale so small that the human mind stumbles badly in attempting to grasp that kind of reality. These are the building blocks that make up YOU in a configuration that will only exist ONCE. That is why the Bible describes you as “BEING FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE.” (Psalm 139:14)

As wonderfully intricate as your atomic structure may be, it gets even more amazing as we reveal the complexity, order and specialization of the individual atoms that make up who you are. The determination as to how many Protons each of your atoms have determines their chemical identity. These protons live in the nucleus of your atoms. This nucleus is just one millionth of a BILLIONTH of the full volume of the atom, but it contains almost all of it’s mass. (One scientist has said that if the atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be the size of a fly!)

So . . . are you impressed by who you are? You have every right to be. In fact, the Bible tells us that you may well be the high point of God’s entire creation. The human brain is the most complex and ordered arrangement of matter in the known universe.   “Thou madest him a little lower than the Angels; Thou crownedst him with glory and honor.” (Heb. 2:7) God calls you “the apple of His eye.” (Zech. 2:8) And who could know you better than the One who made you?  He thinks you are pretty awesome.  Now you wouldn’t presume to contradict God, would you . . . ?  🙂

(With thanks for these inspiring thoughts and concepts to Bill Bryson in “A Short History of Nearly Everything.)