Bewilderment

-

HE WOKE ME IN THE NIGHT. How many stars did you say there are?

I couldn’t be angry. Even yanked from sleep, I was glad he was still stargazing.

“Multiply every grain of sand on Earth by the number of trees. One hundred octillion.”

I made him say twenty-nine zeros. Fifteen zeros in, his laughter turned to groans.

“If you were an ancient astronomer, using Roman numerals, you couldn’t have written the number down. Not even in your whole lifetime.”

How many have planets?

That number was changing fast. “Most probably have at least one. Many have several. The Milky Way alone might have nine billion Earth-like planets in their stars’ habitable zones. Add the dozens of other galaxies in the Local Group…”

Then, Dad…?

He was a boy attuned to loss. Of course the Great Silence hurt him. The outrageous size of emptiness made him ask the same question Enrico Fermi did over that famous lunch in Los Alamos, three quarters of a century ago. If the universe were larger and older than anyone could imagine, we had an obvious problem.

Dad? With all those places to live? How come nobody’s anywhere?