Why Are We So Small in the Universe?

What I am about to write now is not a deep philosophy — it is simply an unexpected intuitive epiphany that came to me after watching a video on YouTube. After all, many philosophers who deny the existence of God point precisely to the insignificant size of man in relation to the world around us. In my previous texts, I relied on physics and logic, and in this short essay, I again use not quotes from ancient or already recognized geniuses and philosophers, but rather, relying on well-known facts from the latest discoveries in astronomy, I point out what is so obvious that it seems nobody thought about it before. If I am only repeating myself, I apologize, but for myself it became the discovery of an obvious truth.

1. Optical law of vision

When I was watching a short version of Joe Rogan’s podcast on YouTube about the sizes of stars and galaxies, I was stunned by the size of celestial bodies. When the stellar monster Stephenson 2-18 (Stephenson 2-18 — the largest known star in the Universe) appeared on the screen, then Rogan’s expression “Look at this motherfucker” seemed to be the only fitting words to convey awe at the grandeur of the universe. Against the backdrop of Stephenson 2-18, even Sirius, Arcturus, and our Sun turn into invisible nanoparticles. We humans are not even ants of the universe; we are the quarks of existence in comparison to it, or even smaller. But now I will tell you something that will lift you up in your own eyes, and you will feel the unique grandeur of man’s microscopic size.

Our microscopic size is not a cosmic accident! Within this shocking disproportion between the scale of human consciousness — capable of embracing this entire vastness and infinity of space, comprehending it all, and not going insane — and our microscopic size relative to infinity, lies a flawless engineering calculation, a strict physical condition for the Universe to ”be seen” at all. We are obliged to be small so that the Gaze of Consciousness can function in the ”here and now” mode.

2. The Catastrophe of the ”Stellar Eye”

The Cosmic Speed Limit In the infinite cosmos, there is one finite value — the speed of light, equal to 300,000 km/s — this is the absolute limit of information transfer on the physical Minkowski screen of our world. To understand how human size is linked to this limitation in the infinity of the universe, let’s consider the sizes of stars and the speed of light.

● Sun: light travels across the diameter of the Sun in about 4.6 seconds, and circles it around the circumference (4.6×3.14) in just 14.5 seconds.
● Stephenson 2-18: this star is so colossal that if placed in the center of our system, it would swallow the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and even Saturn! Light travels across its diameter for more than 8 hours, and for a photon to circle it around the circumference, it takes about 25 hours!

Imagine if Consciousness decided to create a physical ”eye” or a brain the size of such a star. A catastrophic collapse of perception would occur instantly. A photon, having fl own through the pupil, would fl y inside the eye itself to the retina for several hours. While this light is flying inside the darkness of the gigantic eye, the outside image on the ”street” has already changed a hundred times. That is, the eye would transmit not the reality of ”here and now”, but the deep past. The frame would grow obsolete in the process of passing through the lens itself.

● The speed of light (300,000 km/s) is relevant only while the photon flies to the retina.
● But as soon as the light falls onto the retina, it turns into a nerve impulse. And a nerve impulse runs along bio-wires at a speed of only about 100 meters per second!
● If the brain and head of the Observer were the size of the star Stephenson, then the signal from the retina to the visual cortex would take not 8 hours, but thousands of years. The Stellar Observer would realize that a comet is flying at him only a couple of millennia after it crashed into him.

If the human eye had such a huge size, then the Unified Observer would be locked in a perpetual lag, deaf and blind in desynchronized time.

3. The Quantum Interface ”Retina — Brain”: The Milliseconds of Life

Our small size makes the gaze of Consciousness instantaneous and holistic.. Recent studies by neuroscientists (for example, scientists from MIT) prove that the human brain is capable of identifying and processing a fully formed visual image caught by the eye in just 13 milliseconds!

The light fl ow falls onto the retina, triggers a photochemical reaction, and the impulse reaches the visual cortex (V1) via the optic nerve in a fraction of a second. The entire chain — from capturing a quantum of light to realizing the concept ”I see a star” — takes from 13 to 250 milliseconds. The distances inside our heads are so small that the time delay approaches zero. We perceive reality synchronously, at a single point of ”Now”.

Natural Selection as Camera Calibration The Unifi ed Consciousness artifi cially divided itself into billions of living beings and anchored their capabilities in matter. Natural selection in this system is merely a technical tool for optimization. For centuries, it calibrated biological bodies, fi tting them to the strict constants of the Universe: the speed of light and the frequency of photon capture.

We were created as tiny nanoparticles of the cosmos with one purpose — to serve as ideal, ultra-fast lenses, small creators with boundless potentials of the unifi ed consciousness! The stars and galaxies are huge, but without us, they are blind, and they are decorations. And man is the point where the gigantic Universe fi nally shrinks, fl ies through the nano-distance from the pupil to the retina in billionths of a second, and becomes Consciousness that has seen and known itself. We are small so that God can see.

And this engineering calculation of Consciousness is brought in nature to absolute, ringing perfection. Take birds, for example. Their tiny eyes are not just ultra-sharp biological cameras with a mind-boggling optical resolution, capable of instantly calculating the geometry of space. A real quantum navigator based on entangled electrons in cryptochrome proteins is built into their retina. A bird literally sees the magnetic fi elds of the planet, reading the invisible силовые линии (lines of force) of the Universe ”here and now”. Their gaze is technologically more advanced than ours.

And precisely because He is always present in any gaze — a pure, tuned quantum focus of the Absolute, — I feel a sense of anxiety when a bird suddenly starts looking at me very intently. In that moment, it is not just a crow or a pigeon looking at you. Through this tiny, fl awlessly calibrated quantum lens, the Universe itself looks at you intently and without the slightest time delay. And then I frantically try to remember what I have done wrong lately.

Palchevskaya 2026, Why Are We So Small in the Universe?