Iraqi Letters

It never ceased to amaze me how large the Universe is! I often wondered how many stars, pulsars, quasars, etc. there were in the Universe.

Once, I even made a few calculations to try and visualize that enormous magnitude; I started from an ”estimate” of the number of stars astronomers believe there are in the known Universe, and represented each star by a grain of sand.

The result was something like a stretch of sand 10 meters wide, 1 meter deep and 100 kilometers long. Imagine that! Consider further that on average, these grains were so widely dispersed that light, traveling at 300 000 kilometers per second, took four years to reach the first star nearest to us!

Nowadays, I find myself equally fascinated by the number of “bits” of information connected to the internet.

Again, trying to visualize the magnitude using rough estimates, I found that, if each web page is represented by a sheet of paper, the total stack of sheets would be about 300 kilometers long!

Yet, one could reach any of these sheets in a fraction of a second!

These pages are some grains of sand from the ancient deserts of Iraq splashed onto sheets of paper and connected to the World Wide Web. They will hopefully be brought to you by silicon chips made from grains of sand from the deserts of America.