Last Friday night, my daughter Danielle and I were talking about the comet NEOWISE. named after NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission. Formed of ice and dust, and measuring around 3 miles in diameter, this comet comes close enough for us to see for a period of about one month every 6,800 years.

The odds of us being here to see it reminded Danielle of something she’d learned in high school: that the odds of a human being born at all are Infinitesimal. Out of curiosity, I looked it up and basically, humans have about a 1 in 400 trillion chance of being born.

Now, my friend David Ross (he’s the husband of our publisher) Professor at RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences and College of Science, and a brilliant mathematician, would undoubtedly be able to figure out the odds of someone being alive right now to see it during the month or so the comet is observable. He’d probably have to adjust for the number of cloudy nights, and probably some other factors I hadn’t thought of, but there’s no doubt the number of zeros on those odds would be even more daunting.

We’re living in a time of cataclysmic upheaval and change right now, because of coronavirus and political and social turmoil. Sometimes it’s very hard to focus on the positive.

But somehow, when you stand under the darkened summer night sky, sprinkled with stars that twinkle like fireflies, and you can view a comet that comes along only once every 6800 years, it helps you focus on the bigger picture…that our heavenly bodies are lucky to be here at all, and that it’s important to make our shining existence count.

While we can’t all be comets, we can all be stars in someone else’s universe. Whose universe will you brighten today?

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The photo above of NEOWISE was taken at a park near Pultneyville by friend and professional photographer Dick Bennett, co-owner of Image City Photography Gallery. 

 

Post was written for the July 23, 2020 issue of Beyond the Nest’s free weekly newsletter.