Mind. Blown.

Have you ever just thought about how positively amazing and mindboggling some stuff is?

For example, consider a little black ant on your fingertip. It is just a little tiny creature, a little speck on your body. It would fit on your pupil if you didn't blink. And yet, there are things even tinier than the ant. The ant is made up of cells and is probably covered with single-celled organisms. And these cells contain even smaller things. I'm not a microbiologist, so I can't tell you what. But we're talking tiny, tiny.

But then start thinking outward. You are just one of millions of people in your country and billions in the world. And yet, there is still room for everyone. The earth is so huge that we all fit, and there are still large parts that are uninhabited--oceans, deserts, Antarctica. This planet is enormous!

But there are eight planets in the solar system, and only three of them are smaller than Earth. And the ones that are bigger are much, much bigger. Earth could fit in the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. The Great Red Spot is a storm--a storm as big as our planet! Jupiter is huge! But if I recall correctly, it would take ten Jupiters to be the length of the sun's diameter. And that doesn't account for height or depth. According to the textbook for my Geology of Planets class, the sun makes up 99.87 percent of all the mass in the Solar System! We are part of a mere .13 percent, a .13 percent that has to share with Jupiter, Saturn, and all the other planets and asteroids and moons.

But it doesn't stop there. The sun really isn't all too big. A red giant star is as big as Jupiter's orbit! Our sun is tiny in comparison! But there are billions of stars, just in a galaxy! And galaxies are enormous! And there are billions of galaxies!

You might as well be that little tiny ant on your finger.

But space isn't the only mindboggling thing. Have you ever considered deep time?

In September, I will turn a quarter of a century. That's making me feel kind of old. But when I hear of centenarians, I don't feel so old anymore. Those centenarians were born in a time of no TV and no computers.

But then think about a thousand years ago. A thousand years ago, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were major religions. The Roman Empire had fallen centuries before. But America was still unknown to Europe (with the exception of maybe a few Vikings), the Normans had not yet conquered England (and therefore there were not all the French words in English), and the printing press had not been invented.

But a million years ago, there weren't any cities or civilizations. At 450 million years ago, the landscape was barren, and most landforms lived in the water. And at about 4.5 billion years ago, planetesimals were accreting from the solar nebula. And many of the elements now present on earth resulted from  the deaths of other stars that lived sometime in the preceding ten billion years.

Let's put this in a spatial perspective. Let's say that we are drawing a line in which one inch equals a thousand years. At half an inch, people are exploring the newly found American continent. At two inches, Jesus is offending the Pharisees. At ten inches, our ancestors are fighting woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers.

At more than a mile, the dinosaurs are dying off, at the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago. The age of the dinosaurs spreads for a couple of miles.

But for most of the line, there are neither dinosaurs nor people. To go back to the beginning of the earth, our line would be more than 71 miles long!! At one inch equaling a thousand years!

But even on our tiny speck in the universe at our tiny speck in time, there are amazing things going on.

I think language is an amazing thing. The other day I was stopped at a stoplight and I noticed the car next to me trying to get my attention. So I rolled down the window and the passenger said, "Will you let us over?" I said, "All right." I think it's amazing that we, as strangers, were able to communicate with each other. We both speak the same language and we both have American accents but we were not taught to do so. We have been taught language to augment our vocabulary and some matters of communication, but the basics are things that we just naturally picked up on.

I was able to watch my niece grow up for the first four years of her life. She started out as a little baby who could only cry. Then she developed cooing, then babbling. Eventually she was able to pick up a few vocabulary words. She had some problems with overextension, like when she would say apple for any kind of fruit, especially if it was red, or when she would say pie for any dessert, or when she would say bunny for any small mammal (like mice or squirrels). But eventually she got those things straightened out, so that when she was four she was able to construct coherent sentences. Once when we drove past a bowling alley, she said, "If you want to go bowling, just say the word." When she was mad at me, she would say, "You're moving out! Pack up your stuff and go!" Once when she was reproved for telling my mom that she looked like the woman in the weight loss  commercial, she said, "I didn't say fat." Or when she said to my sister, "Your belly's getting big. I think you're going to have a girl!" (Unfortunately, I don't have as full of a linguistic history for my nephews, but they still have interesting stories. Like when my nephew Franklin, when he was not quite three, defended himself against scolding by saying, "I not hit you, I punch you!")

My niece was able to develop all this speech, and our native accent, without ever being taught it. She learned it naturally from being exposed to it. It amazes me that we all pick up on regional accents and words and even entire grammars and languages without formally being taught it.

And our langage has been around for a long tim. I am in an Earlie Moderne Englische class right nowe, and euen though the things that we reede are hundreds of yeares old, they are still very similar and we can still vnderstand most of it. Olde Englishe and Middle Englishe are more difficulte to vndesrtande, but that is also amazinge. Iust as it is amazing to see how animales have euolued ouer time, it is amazing to see how wordes haue euolued ouer time.

There are other things that I think are amazing, like technology and the human body. But I don't have any classes relating to those topics, so I think this will suffice for now.