The highlights of my summers, as I grew up in India, were the nights, when the whole household would move to the rooftop to sleep under the stars.

I remember lying on my back, night after night, looking up in awe at the firmament. Imagination had no bounds. You tried to penetrate the darkness by imagining what was behind the stars. Surely, the firmament must have an end, since everything has an end. So, I'd try to imagine a point somewhere beyond all of the stars after which there were no stars, no lights, no matter.

There must be nothing then, where the universe ended. Just nothingness. I tried to imagine nothingness, since Outer Space too consisted of nothing except masses of matter at huge intervals. Nothingness must then mean Space without stars. But, as with everything else, there must be an end to that nothingness too. What did that look like, where even nothingness ceased to exist….. Somewhere in that thought, I would invariably fall asleep.

It felt exactly the same way when I read, not too long ago, that astronomers have now examined another "small patch" of the sky and "found" more than 600 new galaxies. The patch, they have explained, is 200 million to 400 million light years thick. Each of these new galaxies, they add, holds "anywhere from a few million to 10 billion stars".

Based on this discovery, they have opined, "the number of galaxies thought to be in the universe may have to be doubled". That is, we should now believe there are two billion galaxies in the universe, not just one billion.

I must confess at this point that since my brain has fewer megabytes than my computer, I've had to resort to a dictionary to get a handle on this information.

One light year equals 5,878,000,000,000 miles (that's right, there are 9 zeros). Therefore, if the "small patch" the astronomers say they were studying is conservatively 200,000,000 light years in length, it is actually 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles long (21 zeros). Approximately, of course.

Remember now, this "small patch" has only 600 galaxies. The universe on the whole has more. Two billion of them, to be precise. I checked my dictionary to find out what a billion is. Even though it is one of the largest editions around (2600 pages, 500,000 entries), it shares my difficulty. Resignedly, my Webster's Unabridged Dictionary defines "billion" only as "a very large number". Scout's honour!

But I didn't give up. Elsewhere, I did discover that a billion is 1,000,000,000 (nine zeros). Therefore, the universe is - here we go-o-o-o again - 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles long (30 zeros). More or less.

The Americans, who have been good with large figures ever since they annexed Texas, actually have a name for this precise figure. A nonillion.

Getting back to our story: as I was saying, our astronomers are studying this stretch of two nonillion miles. Even at our own University of Toronto.

Well, I have a humble suggestion to make.

It may not be a bad idea if we gave these fellas a bit of a break. They've obviously been working very very hard. A big bag of coins, a lo-o-ong vacation, and a one-way ticket to Las Vegas may give them a more manageable dose of reality.

In the meantime, back home, the funds thus freed up could be used for more useful results on this imperfect planet of ours. In creating real jobs. In saving the environment. In improving health services. In widening the net of education.

And there's something else we can do, you and I. We can meditate on the idea of a Creator of that stretch of two nonillion miles, and everything that lies beyond it. And decide who amongst us are the favourite and chosen ones of that Creator.

Dr. T. Sher Singh is a Barrister & Solicitor in Guelph, Canada. He is also a regular newspaper columnist and a TV/Radio commentator on current affairs. As well, he writes a weekly column for a Canadian newspaper syndicate.

Sher welcomes feedback and/or discussion on this or any of his other columns. His email address is sher@lawyer.com.