I once asked God
Why did you make the universe so vast?
What were you possibly thinking?
And God said
I was kind of hoping
To have enough room
For all of the poetry yet to be written
This is a poet’s poem, in case you didn’t know it. The universe is vast, mind-bogglingly vast. There seems to be so much empty space, and so little to fill it. The overwhelming majority of this space is cold, near absolute zero; and the warmth of life seems too sparse to not ask some hard questions. The anthropic principle, “that observations of the physical universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it,” also suggests in its vast mathematical underpinnings that these vast amounts of space may be necessary for life to exist. Also, humans, and human consciousness, is fittingly right in the middle of the logarithmic scale of the universe, between the scale of subatomic “particles” and astronomical distances measured in light years. Surely, this is an ideal perch for poets, equidistant from the mysterious veil of quantum wonders uncertain and the ponderous views of an apparently infinite universe. And at the heart of it all, “get a job!” And what a job the poets have: to fill the universe with poetry!
