Grains of sand, stars in the sky

Disclaimer - I promise not to make every post overtly Christian. My faith is so important to me, but at the same time I don't want this blog to be considered inaccessible to nonbelievers. That said, the inspiration for this post came from when I read the Bible this morning.

I am reading through Genesis and got through this passage this morning: 

I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore.

What would you rather have? Offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky or as numerous as the grains of sand on the earth? Which is a bigger number? This is a classic exercise in the difficulty in describing big numbers. We just aren't equipped to fathom the difference between big and huge and absurdly huge and holy Batman that's a big number huge. 

So which is bigger? Surprisingly, there are more stars out there than grains of sand on this earth. Proof? Carl Sagan said it. :)

This blogger (http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~gmackie/billions.html) estimates there are "2000 billion billion grains of sand". That's 2 x 10²¹ or 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains! A Yale astronomer (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/12/01/the-estimated-number-of-stars-in-the-universe-just-tripled/) estimates there are 300 million billion billion stars, or 3 x 10²³ or 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. According to these estimates, there are one hundred and fifty stars per grain of sand on the earth. Yeah. I'll say it again.

There are one hundred and fifty stars PER grain of sand on earth. Mind = blown.

Going back to the Genesis quote, this means that it was entirely superfluous for the angel of the Lord to mention the number of sand grains. Come on! Either that or a ton of stars were made in the past several thousand years. In case you couldn't see my face as I constructed this post, that was sarcasm.

I'm going to now collect a bunch of sand, because apparently it is a rarer thing than stars. By a lot.