There are two giant glass boxes of note in New York City: The Apple Store and the Hayden Planetarium.
One of them contains skinny guys in black T-shirts who would just love to give you a demonstration of the iPhone. Inside the other is the meaning of life.
In a large, white ball at the Hayden Planetarium, Tom Hanks (or maybe it was Helen Hunt or Jodie Foster) narrates a movie about the Big Bang. Once it's over, you and a bunch of kids on a field trip exit onto a multi-story, spiraling ramp that documents the history of the universe. To scale.
Each step you take on the ramp equals about 70 million years. And after walking longer than the length of a football field, you get the punch line: At the bottom, mounted in a glass box, is a single strand of human hair.
The width of that hair represents the entirety of recorded human history.
What. The. Hell.
If all we are in the grand scheme of things is a piece of hair, then that would mean that everything -- art, war, science, love, high school classmate Per Argentine rejecting my Facebook friend request at the beginning of freshman year -- is pointless.
Where does that leave me? Just because my life will make no difference in the history of everything doesn't mean I don't have feelings. Thanks a lot, universe.
A few years later, my mother decided to take my sister and me to a mom-and-pop homemade ice cream shop she read about in the paper. We drove for more than an hour to get there, and when we finally found it, I ordered a mint chocolate chip cone with two scoops. After enjoying a few licks, I was horrified to discover something that shouldn't have been there: a representation of the entirety of recorded human history. And there wasn't just one: There were many. And they were long. Disgusted, I threw the cone away.
A representation of the entirety of human history was enough to stop me from eating my favorite flavor of ice cream. That's power.
So listen up, Hayden Planetarium: You can try to depress me with your scientific proof of how insignificant humanity is, but guess what humanity did that some lame chunks of rocks floating in space will never do?
We invented bow-tie pasta. Guitar Hero. Ginger-flavored Altoids. Run Lola Run. Apple cider. Digital watches. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Daily Collegian.
No matter how great some overrated actor tries to make the Big Bang seem in a planetarium show, a bunch of space crap exploding will never match the awesomeness of a touch-screen phone that allows you to shrink and enlarge digital photographs with a simple pinching motion. We may be living on a hair, but it's the coolest hair in the history of the universe.
Travis Larchuk is a senior majoring in journalism and until 6:15 a.m. today was the Collegian's managing editor of design. His e-mail address is larchuk@gmail.com.
