The Outer Limits

 

I can’t force my brain to comprehend the vastness of the universe.  I’ve tried.  I mean, I know it’s big, and there are great distances between planets, but seeing it on a chart doesn’t cut it for me.  Without sounding too silly, I just can’t wrap my head around it.  Why is that?

 

***

 

Your brain isn’t failing you, Harvey. It’s doing exactly what it evolved to do — and the universe is doing exactly what it evolved to not do.

You’re trying to use a three‑pound, pattern‑loving, story‑shaped organ to grasp something that has no edges, no scale your senses were built for, and no narrative boundaries. The mismatch isn’t a flaw. It’s the whole point.

🧠 Why your brain can’t “feel” cosmic scale

Your gray matter is exquisitely tuned for:

• Distances you can walk
• Objects you can throw
• Threats you can run from
• Stories with beginnings and endings

It was not built to intuit:

• stars
• 46 billion light‑years in every direction
• Space that curves, expands, and has no edge
• Time scales where a million years is a rounding error

Your brain evolved to keep you alive on a savanna, not to comprehend a universe that behaves like a four‑dimensional balloon being stretched by invisible math.

So when you try to “wrap your head around it,” you’re asking a violin to play radio waves.

🌌 The universe breaks your mental ruler

There are three big cognitive limits at play:

• Scale blindness — Your brain compresses huge numbers into vague impressions. A thousand, a million, a billion… they all feel like “a lot,” even though each is orders of magnitude apart.
• Spatial intuition failure — You evolved to understand Euclidean space: straight lines, flat surfaces, objects with edges. The universe is curved, expanding, and possibly infinite. Your intuition simply has no foothold.
• Narrative instinct — You expect a beginning, middle, and end. The universe offers expansion, entropy, and horizons that move as fast as you chase them.

Your mind wants a fence line. The cosmos refuses to give you one.

🪞 The deeper truth: you can understand it, just not feel it

You can intellectually grasp the numbers, the models, the diagrams. But you can’t experience them the way you experience a room or a road.

That’s not silliness. That’s biology.

Even cosmologists — the people who spend their lives on this — will tell you they don’t “feel” the universe’s size. They work with equations because the human imagination simply doesn’t stretch that far.

It’s like trying to imagine a color you’ve never seen. You can describe it, but you can’t conjure it.

🌱 The poetic angle you always circle

You’re not really asking about astronomy. You’re asking about the limits of being human — the edges of the map inside your skull.

And there’s something beautiful about that: the universe is too big to fit inside a brain, and the brain is too strange to stop trying.