The Sun, the Moon, and You
Today I want to talk about the Sun, the Moon, and You.
These may sound like topics you are familiar with - especially the last one - but what you might not know is that the combination of the three in their current form may be the most profound thing in existence.
Let me explain.
The Sun and the Moon are very different, of course. One is a star made mostly of hydrogen and helium gas, and is the centre of our solar system. The other is made mostly of iron and rock, and orbits the earth.
They have something special in common though: the Sun and the Moon appear to be almost exactly the same size from your point of view.
This is not because they are actually the same size. The Sun is much, much bigger than the Moon. If you measure the diameter of the Sun as a two-dimensional disc then it is roughly four hundred times wider than the Moon.
The reason that the Sun doesn’t look so much wider than the Moon to you is because it is also almost exactly four hundred times further away from the Earth than what the Moon is.
Think about that for a moment.
The proportion of the Sun to the Moon is exactly the same as its distance away from you, so that they cancel each other out and appear to be the same size in the sky.
This is why solar eclipses, when the moon moves directly between the Sun and the Earth, cause them to match up so that the Moon not only blocks out the Sun’s light, but also has a glowing halo around it, called a stellar corona.
You’d be correct in thinking that this is an incredible coincidence, but it gets even more mind-blowing than that.
The Moon is moving away from the Earth at a rate of about four centimetres every three hundred and sixty-five days. In a few million years this will drastically change its size in our sky, compared to the Sun.
That may seem like a very long time, but it’s not in the cosmic scheme of things.
So the Sun and the Moon are not only special given their positions in space, but also in time.
And this brings us to you.
The kind of thing you are is only about three hundred thousand years old, compared to the Sun and Moon that are almost five billion years old, or the universe itself which is almost fourteen billion years old.
If all of time between the beginning of the universe and now was compressed into a day, human beings would only have been in existence for less than the last second.
You are also the only kind of thing in the known universe capable of witnessing a solar eclipse. Or thinking about it.
So. Not only is it a remarkable coincidence that the Sun and the Moon have proportions and distances away from the Earth that make solar eclipses possible, but they are also doing so in the narrow window of time during which there is a creature on Earth capable of seeing it.
If that doesn’t make the Sun, the Moon, and You the most mind-blowing thing in existence, then you have an unblowable mind.