Reflective Essay: Death By Black Hole

I recently finished reading a published compilation of essays that you have written called “Death by Black Hole.” Before I read this book, I understood how big the universe was and how dangerous it was to an extent, but after reading this book my horizons have been broadened and I look at things differently than before. After reading your book, I was intrigued by your works and wanted to learn more about the universe. I then proceeded to watch all of the episodes of “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” so I could soak up as much information as possible. Your essays paired with “Cosmos” has changed my worldview entirely.
Before I read your book, I knew that the universe was big, but I couldn’t quite grasp how big “infinity” was. I started to compare …show more content…
Another concept that changed my life is how dangerous everything in our universe is. At any moment, an asteroid could come zooming into our planet and everything we know could disappear. In section one of your book, a chapter is ended like this, “What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos. Have a nice day.” This brings me back to the first concept I wrote about which was how incredibly small and unimportant I am in the whole scope of things. If our earth would be gone, most of the universe would go on with its usual business. When I was young, I would practice counting to 100 and think of how many that was. To me it seemed like that was the maximum and there was nothing past that. As I grew older and learned more numbers, I kept thinking about how large the numbers were getting and how tiny the smaller numbers were getting. Eventually, 100 seemed like a pretty small number. When I finished reading “Death by Black Hole,” I tried comparing things to infinity and the closest concept I came up with was numbers. Just like the universe, they go on