I opened a bag of sugar tonight. I asked my eldest daughter to guess how many grains were in the bag – she guessed at 27 million! I could not even begin to contemplate how many grains of sugar make up a kilo of sugar, never mind everything else in the world. How fascinating and amazing is this world of ours?

There are so many unanswered questions, with so many things to contemplate. How many platelets in a pint of blood? How many droplets of water in a cloud? How many cells make up our body? How many stars in the universe (known and unknown)? How many species of spider (there are more being discovered all of the time)? How many blades of grass on a field? How many grains of sand on a beach, in the desert? It carries on…. How many questions about our world?

How do we find the answers to these questions? Going back to sugar, I Googled it! There are apparently 17.6 million grains of sugar in a 1KG bag! This is deduced by the size and weight of sugar granules starting with demerara sugar and assuming 2.2 grains of white sugar = 1 grain of demerara! Crazy that this question has been answered.

So can we find the answer to all of our questions by using the internet? Nobody seems to know how many stars are in the universe, or how many platelets are in a pint of blood (thought that one would have an answer), or drops of water in a cloud, or any of the other questions. So many unanswered questions. What can we say to our children – perceptive as they are – as we kiss them good night and they glance out of their window and look at the stars, and promptly ask how many there are? We make something up and generally tell a story and send them to sleep with a smile, as they close their eyes and think of all of the fairies with lanterns flying in the night sky! Then we walk out of their room, pull the door to and wonder to ourselves.

You could go crazy pondering every unanswered question, but there are so many. The point of this article? Just to point out the wonders of our world, our universe. To ponder the unanswered, and make you think. There are so many phenomenally amazing facts yet to be discovered, I think sometimes we get lost in the day to day and forget the wonders of what makes our world turn, and our bodies tick tock, and our ecology support so much life (the only planet in the solar system – I wont admit the universe, because I believe!). We really do live in an amazing place and we need to appreciate that.

I guess you could call this a “green” article, because if we don’t look after what we’ve got, then all of these questions will remain unanswered because our world will turn to dust before we get chance. Look after it, and these and many more questions will be answered, maybe not in our lifetime, but we can pave the way for our children and their children and their children’s children….

As for the question of how many stars there are in the universe – I still like to think of them as fairies with lanterns flying in the night sky, going about their busy lives. What do you think? Do you believe in fairies?