The Biggest

An atom of lead is the largest stable atom physically possible. The .57 diameter lead minie ball was outlawed for use in warfare after the Civil War for the horrific damage its large size could do to the human body. World War II artillery shells could be as large as 240 mm in some cases, and they pounded the Japanese for days in their small caves on the island of Iwo Jima. The Japanese islands, while being very small, have one of the biggest populations in the world, with 125 million people. This is just a small fraction, however, of the world's population of 6,446,131,400 people.

All of these people are spread out over the 196,940,400 square mile surface area of Earth. And while that is a large area, the surface area of Jupiter is more than four times as large. Even that is just a small chunk of our solar system, which has a diameter of approximately seven billion miles. Our solar system is a mere speck on the face of our galaxy, which has 3x10^11 stars in it, each star possibly having their own solar system.

But expand your mind outward, where our galaxy is just a tiny droplet in the bucket of 125 billion galaxies in the universe. This is where the real questions lay. What if our universe is just a small particle in an even larger group of universes?

Is there really a biggest? Is there really anything out there that is most definitively the biggest thing there is? If there is a biggest, will we ever find it? How will we know if it's the biggest? And most important, how long can I keep these rhetorical questions coming? Even if we are all just tiny specks of dust on other specks of dust, that shouldn't stop us from focusing on what really matters, living.

Despite what is actually the biggest thing out there, we cannot spend our lives wondering about the cosmic questions of the universe all the time. What does it matter what the biggest thing in existence is? All we need to worry about is the biggest thing we can control, ourselves.