from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Insights by Dhaval Rathod
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."
“Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." (pg.1)
As you begin reading this book and embark upon the remarkable galactic odyssey, be prepared to shed all ego, and feel ridiculously small and unimportant. This completely comic and condescending act starts with the description of the spiral arm of The Milky Way in which we reside. It is termed 'unfashionable'. Like those aliens knew all about fashion! Not only this, the narrator even calls our sun 'unregarded'. No wonder these stars blow off their lids every now and then.
In the context of this story, mankind is but a pitifully backward civilization. Not only that our location in the galaxy and our sun are mocked, but we, the humans have also been relegated to phrases like 'utterly insignificant' and 'amazingly primitive'. You might want to argue with that, yes. Especially when they're about to demolish our planet to make a hyperspace bypass. But as you can see, nothing can ever come out of that debate, particularly when there is a threat to be silenced into extinction. If you look at the bright side of these remarks, let me be honest with you, it is through these kinds of shocking truths that the realization of humility dawns upon us. In the grand scheme, our petty pride and undue arrogance stand for nothing. The illusion that we are the masters of the universe is unfounded, and we have yet to take many leaps. Our sun has been given the status of a god in many cultures, and without its heat and light, life would not have been possible on earth. So, we will try to talk about it with all due respect. But, frankly speaking, there's no simpler way of saying this. So, no offence, sun. Astronomically speaking, our sun is just an average star wandering the outskirts of The Milky Way just like that average-looking guy next door who mostly passes by unnoticed. There are many stars in the universe that are smaller in size than the Sun, but there is also a great deal of those that are bigger, and some of them are insanely huge.
Let's first see where we have pitched our tent in The Milky Way. There are billions of galaxies in the observable universe, each having its own billions of stars. If we only talk about our own galaxy, there are more than 100 billion stars, among which our sun is just one. It is interesting to dwell upon the word 'unfashionable' here now, although nobody ever talked about sending our sun to any beauty pageant. There are systems in our galaxy in which there are two stars (binary star systems) or even more, whereas our solar system just has one - the Sun. While making it more favorable for life, this also makes it a little ordinary and rather lonely. The only fashionable thing about our solar system would be the presence of sentient life. But in this story, with life throbbing and striving in almost every other corner of the galaxy, with beings who carry some device in their pockets to sense an incoming spaceship, the solar system is not the fashion street they would like to visit.
The greatest of human folly was when we believed ourselves to be the center of the universe. Later, it was proven that the Earth goes around the Sun, so we thought that at least our sun must be the center of the universe. Then there were other galaxies discovered. We were proven wrong again and we realized that we were nowhere near the center. We are away from it by a staggeringly crazy distance of 27,000 light-years. In this context, the spiral arm on which we exist may not be the most happening place in the neighborhood. So, all that hullabaloo about being in the galaxy's driving seat can finally be put to rest. We are merely passengers at the back-end of the bus.
Now, let's talk about the size of our sun and why it is regarded or rather 'unregarded' by the narrator of the story. With a diameter of 1.39 million kilometers, the Sun is about 109 times larger than the Earth. But on the mammoth galactic scales, our beloved star gets dwarfed out outrageously. See how it looks when the Sun is pitted against the other giants of the universe.
Image Credit: GiovanniMartin16 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
Are you kidding or what? You see that tiny speck near the center of the picture. That's our sun! UY Scuti, Betelgeuse and Antares outsize it by being 1700, 900 and 740 times larger respectively. Most of the stars shown here are larger than the Sun. Given the abundance of stars in The Milky Way, if there was a casting call for a grand galactic movie, our sun probably won't even make it as an extra, let alone being the star of the show. Even if you ignore the size, our sun isn't the hottest of them all as well. It scores average in that attribute too. No wonder it's so lonely and without a partner star!
So, now you understand why the narrator of the story, who supposedly belongs to a higher civilization and a brighter neighborhood of The Milky Way, is not so much impressed by our sun and its entourage going around it.
However, for all of us down here on this humble little blue-green planet, the Sun is still the superhero of all superheroes. Without him, I wouldn't have been writing this, nor would you be reading this. And if you still think he's not hot enough, well, we'll try to get Mercury's opinion on that one.
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