May 5: How big is the universe?

I get mad when people tell me there could be multiple universes out there. There can't be. It's impossible. There's only one universe. The problem is semantics.

When most people talk about the universe, they are talking about galaxies. They are talking about outer space and stars and planets and black holes and moons and stuff. That's only part of the universe.

The universe is everything that exists. Period. All matter makes up the universe. If it exists, it's part of the universe. So there can't be another universe because that other universe would be part of the universe. Does that make sense?

Good.

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Like I said, the universe is everything. It is stars and planets and solar systems and the Milky Way. It is also other things, like:

- Sub-atomic particles
- Cheez Whiz
- Wilford Brimley's mustache
- My friend, Nah-lee, and her husband, Ari, and their two kids, who all live in California
- California
- A little kid eating grapes
- Pieces of steak
- Malona
- Broken bits of barbed wire lying by a fencepost in Wyoming

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The universe is infinite and it goes on forever. This is only logical even though it's not. I mean, when you get to the edge of the universe, what do you find? More universe.

It just goes on and on and on.

You can drive yourself mad thinking about it or you can just accept that there's nothing you can do about it and just go ahead and live your meaningless life on this small speck of dust we call Earth.

I am not an atheist even though this paragraph probably reads like something an atheist would write.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

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Stephen King's Dark Tower series takes place on a planet that is contained in an atom that is in a weed growing in an abandoned lot in New York City. Even though it is in this weed, the Beatles song HEY JUDE managed to make it to the sub-atomic level.

Paul McCartney would be so proud.

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I think the Dark Tower would be better if, instead of being in a weed, the Dark Tower planet was in an atom in Wilford Brimley's mustache.

It's the right thing to do.

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Time and space both must be eternal, but time is a bigger mindblast than space.

I mean... think about it. The present shouldn't exist since the number of seconds that preceded us is infinite. And since time just keeps going back and back, it doesn't make sense that we should experience anything because it would take too long to get here. This is probably solipsistic of me but I only wrote that because I just found out what solipsistic means and I really wanted to use it in a sentence.

So, great, I lost my train of thought.

Okay... I am told that time started with the Big Bang but this doesn't make sense because that means that nothing happened before the Big Bang. Well, I don't buy that. Stuff had to have happened before the Big Bang. What didn't happen was that a guy was standing there with a stopwatch to see how long it would take before those two atoms right there exploded and made the Milky Way and eventually Charles Darwin and Cheez Whiz and Wilford Brimley and Jill Hennessy, who is the prettiest girl on planet Earth (next to Wonder Woman.)

Jill Hennessy thinks these notes are funny.

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I wish I was a dog. If I was a dog, my brain would be too feeble to dwell on stuff like the eternal bigness of the universe. I would only care about eating Alpo and smelling other dogs' bums.

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I do not believe in time travel.

Some physicists believe that time is shaped like a bell. They are wrong. It is a straight line. If we could travel in time, we would have gone back to stop Hitler and Stalin and the Ice Capades.

I could be wrong about this. Apparently, there is something called a Hadron Collider that can send atoms back in time by about a billionth of a second - which, coincidentally, is how long it takes me to get bored watching golf on television.

And if I could ask God one question, I would not ask him how big the universe is or what came before the first second. I would ask him if He likes being God.

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Early this morning, I was watching TV and there was this show where William Shatner was talking to a theatre audience about his life. It was called Shatner's World and it was magnificent. I say this as someone who does not like Star Trek at all. I do, however, like William Shatner, who was funny and self-deprecating.

Probably Star Trek explored the issues of time and space that I bring up here. I will likely never see them because I do not like Star Trek and I am afraid to watch an episode on Netflix because I no longer want to be a nerd.

But when I was in Calgary last, an old episode of Columbo came on TV and Leonard Nimoy, who plays Spock on Star Trek, was the guest murderer. He played a surgeon. William Shatner was also a guest murderer on Columbo. Twice.

See, Columbo is where it's at. He didn't care how old the universe is or if time is eternal or bell-shaped or whatever. He just cared that he found a laundry ticket in a dead man's hand and it didn't make sense and he was going to spend the rest of the episode hounding his main subject until he finally accuses him of murder.

Just one more thing... Are you a Young Earth creationist?

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There are just some things that man will never know.

Actually, that's incorrect.

There are just some things that man knows.

Some things.

The universe is home to an infinite number of facts and 99.99999999 per cent of them we can never even dream of discovering. We must content ourselves staring at a pinprick on the tip of an iceberg.

We are all so profoundly ignorant. We are only smart when we compare ourselves to each other.

In the face of all this mystery, there is only one thing to say.

It is this:

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!