As a little kid, Buzz lightyear was one of my heroes, a sentiment which was cemented when he became the first to introduce me to the awe-inspiring ‘infinity’. Buzz himself embodies the basic essence of infinity: adventure and a sense of uncertainty. The idea “To infinity and beyond”, was as paradoxical as the proclamation was profound, which gave my younger self a sense of wonder and awe.
When I was 6 years old, my great uncle Jack played a clever joke upon me. He pulled out a piece of paper from his breast pocket and upon it inscribed a circle, telling me that he would give me a dollar if I could trace the circle with my finger from beginning to end, not stopping until I hit a clear ending point. Me being the money loving, competitive and enthusiastic rugrat I was, I set right to work, tracing the circle from a random …show more content…
The sky for example was once thought to be as far as man could go, but the moon landing showed that for mankind, limits were meant to be shattered. The Hubble telescope can see into parts of our universe 15 billion light years away that are too far away to even comprehend, yet we can see them. If the universe is truly infinite, then so are the possibilities for mankind. Lastly, infinity is important because it brings up the question of death. Death is the end point to an always finite life, yet, even after we die, time continues on just as it did before we even came into existence. On the timeline of infinity we are just an indistinguishable speck, gone and forgotten as quickly as we came to be. Yet, the most glorious and incomprehensible thing about infinity is just this: that time and infinity can only be defined by consciousness, that consciousness itself is finite, that infinity doesn’t exist at
When I was 6 years old, my great uncle Jack played a clever joke upon me. He pulled out a piece of paper from his breast pocket and upon it inscribed a circle, telling me that he would give me a dollar if I could trace the circle with my finger from beginning to end, not stopping until I hit a clear ending point. Me being the money loving, competitive and enthusiastic rugrat I was, I set right to work, tracing the circle from a random …show more content…
The sky for example was once thought to be as far as man could go, but the moon landing showed that for mankind, limits were meant to be shattered. The Hubble telescope can see into parts of our universe 15 billion light years away that are too far away to even comprehend, yet we can see them. If the universe is truly infinite, then so are the possibilities for mankind. Lastly, infinity is important because it brings up the question of death. Death is the end point to an always finite life, yet, even after we die, time continues on just as it did before we even came into existence. On the timeline of infinity we are just an indistinguishable speck, gone and forgotten as quickly as we came to be. Yet, the most glorious and incomprehensible thing about infinity is just this: that time and infinity can only be defined by consciousness, that consciousness itself is finite, that infinity doesn’t exist at