OUR LITTLENESS IN THE UNIVERSE.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 913, 29 January 1881, Page 6

OUR LITTLENESS IN THE UNIVERSE.

Astronomers say that this world of ours, which seems to us so large, is in fact so small in comparison with the sun and stars, that its presence or absence is, to the universe, a matter of inconceivably small importance; and that, even in its own system, it would hardly be noticed by an eye capable of taking in at one view the sun and its attendant planets. Sir John Herschel gives the following illustration of the size and distance of these bodies : —“ Choose,” he says, “ any well levelled field. On it place a globe 2ft in diameter; this will represent the sun ; Mercury will be represented by a grain of mustard seed on the circumference of a circle 164 ft in diameter for its orbit; Venus, a pea in a circle of 284 ft in diameter ; the earth, also, a pea on a circle of 430 f t; Mars, a rather large pin’s head in a circle of 654 f t; Jupiter, a moder-ate-sized orange in a circle nearly half a mile across ; Saturn, a smaller orange on a circle of four-fifths of a mile ; Uranus, a full-sized cherry upon the circumference of a circle more than a mile and a half ; and Neptune, a goodsized plum on a circle two and a half mile in diameter.” If our earth were struck out of existence, it would hardly be missed from such a system. But this is far from the extreme measure of our littleness. The evening sky is studded with stars. Between us and them is empty space. As we look across it, the distance does not seem so very great, and even astronomers were long in learning how great it is, and how utterly isolated the sun, with its train of planets, is from even the nearest star. Keeping the same scale as before, in which our inconceivable distance from the sun, 92 one-third million of miles, was reduced to a dozen rods or so, and then setting out to visit our neighbors, if we are lucky enough to turn our steps to the nearest, we find before us a journey of nearly 9,000 miles. Had we directed our course to any other of the stars our road would have been many thousand miles longer. There are stars from which light requires 6000 years to reach our globe.