‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me’
Blaise Pascal

Both in astronomical space and microscopic space, we are struck by how little is actually going on, most of the playing field is empty. The same can be said for time, for most of the time, nothing is happening. Fortunately, we are of a size (and duration!) where we are approximately midway in size between the largest and longest and the shortest and smallest. Consequently, we have the ability to probe with our reason, our senses and our tools in either direction, up or down, in or out.

There is at least one other dimension besides space and time: complexity. Here, as far as we can tell, we are located at one of the extremes. We are the most complicated thing we know of, but it appears we know a lot more about things that are less complicated than we do about things more complicated than us.

Think of it this way, it takes very little knowledge or understanding of say, an automobile or a building, to utilize it for the purpose for which it is intended. The thousands or millions of hidden parts and subsystems and their relations to each other in even the most common and ordinary items we come into contact with every day may be essential, but they are for all practical purposes invisible.

The vast portions of the universe which seem superfluous to us are no doubt essential to the proper functioning of the whole. The fact that they seem so extravagantly empty to us is probably just an artifact of our shortcomings rather than a profound observation in its own right. The earth is big, the solar system is big, the galaxy is big, the universe is big, and so on. Each level is beyond human comprehension, and far exceeds the previous in extent. They are all equally incomprehensible to us on an instinctual level, but we manage somehow to understand each regime, each level of bigness, with some confidence.

I have learned not to worry about it.