In one of Sir Terry pratchett’s Discworld novels the nature of the world is discussed: it is a Disk on the backs of 4 elephants who are in turn standing on the shell of a turtle, and the question always comes around “what is the turtle standing on” and a women answers “it’s turtles all the way down”. For some reason this has always stuck with me as an interesting way to view the world. What if it was turtles all the way down not in the nature of a stack of turtles but everything below or smaller than a turtle was just a turtle by another shape and size.
This isn’t a new philosophical idea, although the name of it escapes me at the moment, and my entire understanding of it is in a vague soft science face value manner. However, when one is sequestered with hot water and a soapy loofah it’s fun to make comparisons. Start with atoms for examples. They have a nucleus and orbiting bodies. The spaces in between atoms are empty dead space. Now scale all the way up to the solar system and we have a central object, the sun, with orbiting bodies and in between solar systems there is nothing but dead empty spaces. There is also another fun one to consider: habitable planets are echos of the human body when considered from the viewpoint of a parasite. The space between hosts are inhabitable and dangerous to cross but the new colony landing on a fresh host have copious resources and untamed spaces to take advantage of.
Naturally there are a myriad of differences within either example that with close scrutiny will cause the comparison to fall apart and it’s not possible to make an ironclad statement that this is how the universe works. This is merely a different lense to view the world in, big things are just little things at their heart, and little things can be big things with a wide enough lense. This can make the universe more manageable when it tries to crush you under the unrelenting complexity of existence and sometimes we all need that.