Applied Logic

This is how it all works. Everything on your computer is dependent upon this logic. 

The hard part is finding a way to care about this, or finding someone who cares about this. So, if you are still here, congratulations, I like you better, already!

In case you are wondering, I’m writing this article today as a result of something someone said in church, today. It was, in a word, unsettling.

You can search for this yourself, so, please do. Someone said that scientists say there are something like 100 billion stars in our galaxy. And, she continued, there may be 100 billion galaxies in the universe. I’ve done the searches and these words are close to what you will find, except that this search...

“how many stars and galaxies are there in the universe”

Yields these results. There are about 10 billion galaxies in the observable universe! The number of stars in a galaxy varies, but assuming an average of 100 billion stars per galaxy means that there are about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that's 1 billion trillion) stars in the observable universe!

So, what bothers me about these suppositions? It’s pretty simple. As long as you understand the concept of infinity, you should find it easy to realize that we simply do not know what we cannot know. Since we have no way to see whether there is an end to the universe, there can be no way to theorize how many of anything there are in an infinite space.

You don’t even need to understand logic to fully grasp this concept. But, having learned logic and having an appreciation for that very simple and basic application of ones and zeros to the core of how things works helps me, when considering abstract concepts, like nothingness and infinity.

Perhaps a better question to ask is this: Why do we need to guess at how many stars there are in the universe? Or, how is it that we cannot simply accept there are things we cannot know?

About how many stars are in space?