In the latter half of the Twentieth Century there was a television celebrity (which some people might consider to be a big thing) who was known for the expression “billions and billions” — namely Carl Sagan. Today, “billions and billions” almost sounds quaint — we see Sagan’s “billions and billions”, raise a trillion times and many more than that, too.

Things exist in large numbers, and things exist in large size, too. If there were something intelligent “out there“, would that intelligence see Earth as one somewhat big thing or as many relatively small things? Either way, what is even more vast than “all the things” is the innumerable number of empty spaces. Yes, emptiness is so small that its lack of existence is indeed infinite.

Yet before I drift off into arguing with myself whether I feel there is something rather than nothing (or vice versa), I would prefer to focus on the contrast between big things and small things. And rather than primarily paying attention to celestial bodies or nebulous clouds, let’s instead try to focus on “human” scales … such as individual people versus large mobs or even entire populations.

Online, this is actually a dichotomy which seems to be extremely widespread. Either something is a global phenomenon, or it is merely an individual speck of dust. It seems like nothing at all exists between those two extremes. How absurd is that?

Is it absurd to look at a human and wonder how many individual organisms are clustered and clumped together as one? Is it absurd to consider whether individual humans likewise can be clustered and clumped into groups? Is it absurd to ask ourselves: why are there so few things we view as groups, which display evidence of group behavior, which are in between the extremes of individual versus global?

My gut feeling / hunch is that such questions are not absurd. Instead: They are complex, and complex questions are difficult to answer. This is why Occam’s Razor dictates that the scientific approach ought to simplify complexity, and thereby ask (and aim to answer) relatively managable questions.

Yet there is great wisdom in recognizing that the real world is indeed really complex, and if we seek to resolve only simple questions, then perhaps we will go extinct before we get very far with that project.