The Salt Monument is all about perspective, and seeing ourselves as part of a global whole. It is…read morebetter if I quote from the website:
"THE SALT PERSPECTIVE
Keeping things in perspective---
Ourselves as individuals;
Ourselves as a species on this planet at this moment in time;
The infinite enormity of the mysterious microcosmos;
Our existence in an incomprehensibly vast universe;
---Is increasingly difficult amidst the modern profusion of information and our personal absorption.
Using the simple symbol of a crystal of salt as a starting point,
The salt perspective engages us in an exploration of
Dimensional context and relative scale.
It is hard to comprehend there are over six and a half billion people, spread out on a sphere that is nearly 200 million square miles. The salt perspective can help us picture it. When we travel in an airplane at an altitude of 30,000 feet and look down upon the landscape, we see structures and roads as miniaturized evidence of human activity. But from that distance, a human being appears incredibly small---perhaps the size of a single grain of salt. Imagine if, at that altitude, we were to take every human being on the planet, represent each one as a grain of salt, and gather them together in one grouping. We would end up with about a cubic yard (27 cubic feet) of tiny grains of salt. Perhaps to so reduce humanity and render us inanimate seems unfamiliar, but it allows an unlimited extension of understanding.
We have, for example, grown accustomed to the reduction of our huge, life-filled Earth into an inert, fourteen-inch ball. A globe has become a familiar model of our planet, which simultaneously fulfills a virtually endless array of applications.
So it is with the Salt Monument as a model of the human race. In a series of interactive exhibits and examples of scale which accompany the Monument, we can explore understandings and perspectives otherwise incomprehensible to us. For example:
Our body: If a grain of salt represented one cell of our body, it would take about ten thousand Salt Monuments filled to the current level to represent the sixty trillion cells which make up one human body.
Life on Earth: If every grain of salt in the Salt Monument today stood for one year, this would represent about the number of years the Earth has been a planet. Find the two billion marker on the cube. That would represent when single-cell life first emerged on Earth. Find the four billion marker on the cube. That would represent when sponges---the first multi-cellular life--- began. Find the 4.5 billion marker on the cube. That would represent the first appearance of human-type creatures. One-quarter cup of salt would represent the past 350,000 years of human life on Earth, long before recorded history. Less than one teaspoon of all the salt currently in the Salt Monument would represent the 12,000 years of known human history in the context of the history of the Earth.
Our galaxy: If a grain of salt represented our Sun or any average star, the next nearest star would be another tiny, grain of salt fully nine miles away! It would take about forty Salt Monuments filled to the current level to represent the number of suns or stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. To model the size of our Milky Way, we could take that 68,000 pounds of salt and spread those 260,000,000,000 individual grains throughout a circle that was 210,000 miles in diameter. "
Harmony speaking again: Groups and individuals can visit the Salt Monument. It is actually quite educational. You have to make an appointment to visit, and the website explains all of that.
