between. Somewhere deep inside, he knew it was beautiful, but he didn’t care about that either.
Emal watched the traffic flowing past for a while longer, half hoping that someone might stop and talk to him or ask him how he was doing, but no one stopped. He suspected that even if these people were aware, he would still be invisible to them. Once you enter a forest with millions of trees, it’s too much work for someone to pick out an individual from the crowd. It becomes just a forest, not a group of individual trees. Maybe that’s why there are forest fires , he thought, a tree just wants to be noticed. What better way to do that than to set yourself, and everyone around you, on fire.
He carefully watched some cats as they walked along the tube on the opposite side. He could swear one of them was the orange tabby that had asked him for a cheezburger earlier. They made no move in his direction, but then, he wasn’t even sure he cared about that anymore either. Maybe being eaten by cats would be a better way to go than to wander the tubes alone forever.
Emal was done. It was time to toss in the cards. He slumped and let his head fall to his chest.
~
In this moment of depression, now might be a good time to discuss the size of the Internet.
The Internet is unfathomably big.
It’s a rare circumstance when the word “unfathomably” is an understatement. It’s even rarer that the word “unfathomably” is used at all, but the Internet is so mind-numbingly vast that any attempt to grasp its size will typically leave people soaked in tears. Fits of uncontrollable rage are also an accepted response when realizing how insignificant you are.
There are moments in everyone’s lives when they become aware of their insignificance in a cosmological sense. Fleeting seconds when we understand the saying about all the grains of sand on earth being nothing compared to the stars in the known universe. This realization typically occurs when driving late at night on a lonely road with some emo band playing in the background. On these occasions, a person is overwhelmed with the proper sense of scale needed to understand their insignificance, and they get an empty sucking feeling in their chest cavity. Emal has had this feeling twice already today, without knowing what it meant. (note: if on such occasions you have recently eaten fast food after a night of drinking, this moment is more likely to be heartburn, and you should take an antacid.)
The usual urge after having this feeling is to drive yourself off the road into the nearest tree, ending it all with some finality. However, with the invention of social media and cell phones, people today can instead check for updates from other drunken friends to assure themselves they are not alone. Interestingly, it has been noted by researchers that approximately the same number of people, who prior to cell phones being invented would have succumbed to this suicidal urge, also die when they run into trees while checking the previously mentioned social media. Researchers, of course, pretend to be baffled by the phenomenon to get more grant money for further research, but they commonly believe that this is Mother Nature’s way of getting revenge on humanity since we have eliminated all of our natural predators by dumping the chemicals used to make said phones in said predators’ natural habitats.
The point here, in case you’ve missed it, is that the Internet is as unfathomably big as space. And that feeling you get of insignificance late at night is the scale you should use to understand the plight of our formerly naked man. If you need a slightly more substantial explanation, please read the final paragraph in this section. If you are all set and no can longer tolerate this discussion of cosmological scale, you can skip ahead to the word “Just.” (How exciting! A choose your own adventure book.)
The physical infrastructure of the Internet is composed of millions of miles of fiber
Emal watched the traffic flowing past for a while longer, half hoping that someone might stop and talk to him or ask him how he was doing, but no one stopped. He suspected that even if these people were aware, he would still be invisible to them. Once you enter a forest with millions of trees, it’s too much work for someone to pick out an individual from the crowd. It becomes just a forest, not a group of individual trees. Maybe that’s why there are forest fires , he thought, a tree just wants to be noticed. What better way to do that than to set yourself, and everyone around you, on fire.
He carefully watched some cats as they walked along the tube on the opposite side. He could swear one of them was the orange tabby that had asked him for a cheezburger earlier. They made no move in his direction, but then, he wasn’t even sure he cared about that anymore either. Maybe being eaten by cats would be a better way to go than to wander the tubes alone forever.
Emal was done. It was time to toss in the cards. He slumped and let his head fall to his chest.
~
In this moment of depression, now might be a good time to discuss the size of the Internet.
The Internet is unfathomably big.
It’s a rare circumstance when the word “unfathomably” is an understatement. It’s even rarer that the word “unfathomably” is used at all, but the Internet is so mind-numbingly vast that any attempt to grasp its size will typically leave people soaked in tears. Fits of uncontrollable rage are also an accepted response when realizing how insignificant you are.
There are moments in everyone’s lives when they become aware of their insignificance in a cosmological sense. Fleeting seconds when we understand the saying about all the grains of sand on earth being nothing compared to the stars in the known universe. This realization typically occurs when driving late at night on a lonely road with some emo band playing in the background. On these occasions, a person is overwhelmed with the proper sense of scale needed to understand their insignificance, and they get an empty sucking feeling in their chest cavity. Emal has had this feeling twice already today, without knowing what it meant. (note: if on such occasions you have recently eaten fast food after a night of drinking, this moment is more likely to be heartburn, and you should take an antacid.)
The usual urge after having this feeling is to drive yourself off the road into the nearest tree, ending it all with some finality. However, with the invention of social media and cell phones, people today can instead check for updates from other drunken friends to assure themselves they are not alone. Interestingly, it has been noted by researchers that approximately the same number of people, who prior to cell phones being invented would have succumbed to this suicidal urge, also die when they run into trees while checking the previously mentioned social media. Researchers, of course, pretend to be baffled by the phenomenon to get more grant money for further research, but they commonly believe that this is Mother Nature’s way of getting revenge on humanity since we have eliminated all of our natural predators by dumping the chemicals used to make said phones in said predators’ natural habitats.
The point here, in case you’ve missed it, is that the Internet is as unfathomably big as space. And that feeling you get of insignificance late at night is the scale you should use to understand the plight of our formerly naked man. If you need a slightly more substantial explanation, please read the final paragraph in this section. If you are all set and no can longer tolerate this discussion of cosmological scale, you can skip ahead to the word “Just.” (How exciting! A choose your own adventure book.)
The physical infrastructure of the Internet is composed of millions of miles of fiber
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