Please rain down your wisdom upon us....
I will offer a parable.
A couple hundred years ago, researchers (scientists and mathematicians) were studying the energy output of the sun. You can do this for yourself, you know.
Anyway, they were calculating how much energy was needed to say, heat water and stuff at this distance from the sun, (which by then, they had calculated).
Now the interesting thing is that this "rain" of energy happens not only all over the sunlit portions of Earth, but on the moon as well, all the space surrounding Earth, and all of the area that Earth travels through in its orbit around the Sun.
The energy passes through the area a million miles above and below that orbit as well. In fact, the energy output of the sun goes out in all directions; in a spherical volume that may be unimaginable for most, but that is calculable if you are patient. It is an enormous quantity of energy.
A few years into this process, Albert Einstein showed that there was a mathematical relationship between matter and energy.
You see, they knew how much energy was falling on one square yard of surface, on Earth, at this distance from the sun, and that was useful and interesting. But then they extrapolated that to the just ginormous amount of energy that was suffusing all space around us. But that number was just too big to be meaningful. Too many zeroes, you know? Well, that was the idea, anyway. Even that number, that E=mc2 calculation to put the unimaginable into the imagible, was way too big, too!
.
Four million tons.
.
A second.
.
Four million tons of mass disappear from existence every second, for sixty seconds a minute, for one thousand four hundred and forty minutes every day, for all three hundred and sixty-five and one-quarter days every year, and has been doing so for at least four billion years!
.
And it is expected to continue "burning" at this prodigious rate for at least another five billion years before changing in any remarkable manner.
That's a lot of energy, a lot of mass, and a lot of wasted opportunity to recharge your cell-phone with a small solar cell array.
Now, it may be humbling to think that all of this was arranged for us, so that we could enjoy a sunny day at the beach and all that, but now I want to point out something that should make you re-adjust your scales of wow! once more.
Most of that energy goes out into cold, dark, empty space, zipping along at a sedate one hundred and eight-six thousand miles per second, obeying the law and everything, and just disappearing into the night.
Our night.
That dark, dark night of cloudless climes and starry skies, shining out like a beacon into nothingness ...
Wait, starry skies?
There are other beacons, other stars, other suns out there, burning their tons of hydrogen too? Billions of stars beyond the counting of them? One hundred billion in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and hundreds of billions of galaxies?
That's ...
.
Wow!