One of the joys of parenting is fielding unexpected questions. Today on the way to church, my 7 year-old daughter, who was playing in the back seat with a certain egg timer that has become one of her most cherished totems, suddenly asked whether there were more grains of sand in her egg timer than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. This was not altogether a surprising query; for weeks we have been talking about stars and galaxies, and I have tried to give her some appreciation of the immensity of the universe by letting her help me classify newly-discovered galaxies via NASA's laudable web site. As a result, she understands, perhaps better than most of her peers, that those distant smears of light we call galaxies are in fact congeries of stars whirling through the void at unimaginable distances from our humble earth.
But how did the pink-hued sands in her own egg timer compare with our galaxy? I told her that I seriously doubted that there were 300 billion grains of sand in her timer, as there are estimated to be stars in our galaxy (though that number may be a severe under-calculation; astronomers have ascertained that M-31, our galactic "twin," the great spiral galaxy in Andromeda, probably contains as many as a trillion stars).
In point of fact, galactic numbers are almost disspiritingly large. Our own galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years across, meaning that a beam of light, even if it were sufficiently brilliant to be perceived across such an expanse, would take 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. Even the very nearest stars outside our own sun -- those in the so-called "solar neighborhood" -- are trillions of miles away. One light year being roughly 6 trillion miles, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is more than 4 light years, or 24 trillion miles, distant.
And how large a number is a trillion? Well, there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. That means that, counting by seconds, it would take more than 31 years just to count to 1 billion (I've been on the earth for a little more than 1.5 billion seconds). But a trillion is one thousand billions, so it would take more than 31,000 years to count to 1 trillion, and 186,000 years to count to six trillion -- the number of miles in a light-year.
In the last couple of years, there has been some excitement in the astronomical community over a family of planets found to be orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581, at least two of which have been tagged as potentially habitable. This star is among the closest to earth, but at a "mere" 20.3 light-years (119 trillion miles), it is inconceivable that we shall ever be able to go there ourselves. After all, the light from that star now reaching the earth started its journey back in 1992 (from our vantage-point), before most of my university students were even born.
And many of the brightest stars in the sidereal heavens are much farther away than that. The blue supergiant Rigel in the constellation Orion is about 860 light-years out; the light of Orion's brightest star began its journey to earth sometime around the Second Crusade, in the time of Bernard de Clairvaux and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Deneb, the most distant first magnitude star, is perhaps 1500 light years away (though it may be as far as 1800 light years), meaning that in Deneb we are seeing luminosity generated sometime between the time of Septimius Severus and Justinian. The entire Dark Ages and rise of Western Civilization transpired while the photons from Deneb now arriving on the shores of earth were traversing interstellar space.
All these are still very local objects. In an object 100,000 light years across, the distance from earth to Deneb is a tiny hop. The halo of ancient globular clusters in which our spiral galaxy is immersed extends tens of thousands of light-years above and below the galactic plane, while the galactic center, where a mysterious source of extraordinary energy is hidden among dense clouds of brilliant stars and nebulae, is at least 20,000 light years from earth. Thus the light arriving at our remote corner of the galaxy from the galactic core has been in transit for many millenia before any semblance of human civilization appeared on earth, since before the last great ice age even began, in all likelihood.
Beyond our own galaxy lie countless others, stretching out to the very limits of detectability at more than 10 billion light years. The light from those objects originated long before the earth or solar systen even existed, even by the most generous geologic chronologies. And every one of them is as immense and unknowable as our own star system. Little wonder that the Lord, in attempting to help his choicest servants, like Moses and Abraham, comprehend the grandeur of the cosmos, characterized his creations as uncountable. "Worlds without number I have created," he informed an awestruck Moses, adding, "Innumerable are they to man, but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them."
How this can be so is far beyond the grasp of mortal man, even one so enlightened as Moses. We are told that the grand purpose behind all of the works of God -- behind the totality of the observed and observable universe -- is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man, a life frequently characterized by the syntactically curious modifier "worlds without end." For Latter-Day Saints, the human race extends far beyond this earth, both in time and space. The race of beings sired by Heavenly Father populates the entire cosmos; there are countless worlds beyond our own peopled with such as ourselves, and perhaps by other intelligent races as well -- more than this we are no better informed than were Moses and Abraham.
But we know enough to say that the universe is purposeful, that it is intelligent, and that the great drama of the human race is being replicated, perhaps in infinite variety, all across the immensity of the cosmos: the eternal pageant of Intelligence, or of intelligences, as they are conducted upward from primordial awareness to eternal perfection, worlds without end.
Not only is the macrocosm grand beyond imagining. I pointed out to my daughter as we passed the green fields near the chapel, which are already thick with foot-high grass and spring wildflowers, that the number of blades of grass in a single field is impossible to reckon, let alone the totality of grass blades in our home state of Pennsylvania. So too with the number of leaves on a single wooded mountainside, or the grains of sand on a single beach.
It is to the sand metaphor that we are ineluctably drawn back, in contemplating such matters as these, the macro and the microcosmic. For while it is mind-boggling enough to consider that the Lord's reckoning can keep track of every blade of grass -- or, indeed, of every molecule in every cell in every blade of grass -- as easily as it can tabulate all of the grains of sand on all of the beaches of all of the worlds in the universe, it is sobering to consider that He uses the sand descriptor to characterize the posterity of the righteous. It was Abraham -- and by extension, all those of his literal and adopted posterity who receive the covenants he received -- who was promised posterity as numberless "as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore" (rough estimates have reckoned the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of the world at 7.5 quintillion, and of the number of stars in the universe as at least 100 times that number!). And this promise, we understand, is not confined to mortality, but will be in force forever. These are, perhaps, not matters that a new parent, struggling to change a dirty diaper, will want to consider too deeply!
Yet they speak of the capacities that we will develop, sometime in eons to come, of participating in the great work that is our Heavenly Father's primary task, to multiply and replenish the cosmos with our own kind, and to help as many as are willing of our own eventual posterity to grow to exaltation and eternal lives in their own turn.
Sand, then, is an emblem both of time and of eternity, of both the fleeting limits on our mortal lives (as even the old soap opera tagline used to express it) and of our eternal potential beyond the veil.
