Thought experiments

Picture yourself at the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. You’re expanding in every direction at the speed of light, turning into quarks, protons, electrons, and other elementary particles. Then, you cool down and form hydrogen and helium atoms floating in nearly empty space. Feel the force of gravity clumping you together to form stars.

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Think about getting pulled into a black hole and somehow maintaining individual consciousness, even though there’s infinite density at the center of the hole and the atoms of your body are demolished. What’s it like to have zero mass and be in a place where time and space are obliterated?

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Contemplate the fact that none of your body’s 30 trillion cells (apart from your brain cells) will be the same seven years from now. Visualize your stomach cells being replaced every week, and your skin cells every month. Imagine your liver cells completely changing every six weeks. Picture the red blood cells that carry oxygen to every part of your body being replaced every four months.

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Instead of picturing yourself as you are now, try to visualize yourself as your grandmother or grandfather. Then try to picture yourself as your grandparent’s grandparent. Keep going back a couple of generations at a time for 195,000 years—when all available evidence indicates that human beings first came into existence.

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Think about how you’re related to your siblings because you share the same parents, and to your cousins because you share the same grandparents. Then visualize going back about 10,000 generations to find the first human—the common ancestor shared by all eight billion people alive today, including your colleagues, customers, competitors, and shareholders.

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I keep going back to these thought experiments proposed by Brads Jacob every now and again.

They remind me of the most simple and complicated of lessons. Our shared humanity is more connected than we credit. We have what it takes to have outsized impact on the world within, and around us. We are ‘tiny’ in the grand scheme of things.

And we have all we need to be present, right here, right now.