This is a kind of melancholy rant on our place in the Universe.
When I was a kid around 7 years old or so, I went with my father on a trip to the country side. One night we were out in the field camping and we were looking up at the sky and we saw the Milky Way galaxy. It was clear and I remember I could almost feel that you could reach out and touch the star clusters. It was the first time I think that I realized how BIG the Universe is and how small the Earth is and how smaller we are as individuals on this Earth. My father said that there were still stars that are too far away that their light has not yet reached Earth. I remember I did not understand why that was so then.
Forward to present day. Starting when the pandemic forced many of us to stay indoors because of government travel restrictions, I started to pass the days by watching an assortment of channels on Youtube and Netflix. I was drawn into the science channels - physics, astronomy, history channels. Star Talk (Neil DeGrasse Tyson), Cool Worlds, Nova and Joe Rogan when he interviews scientists on his podcast.
Watching these scientists explain that the Universe is expanding at nearly the speed of light and that the distance from edge to edge of what they 'think' is the edge of the Universe is so large that the human mind fail to grasp this number. That there are stars that are 1000x larger than our sun. Betelgeuse is so large that if placed at the center of the solar system, its edge would reach Jupiter. And there are some other stars that are bigger than Betelgeuse although due to their distance, their measurements are still being debated on by the scientific community.
Watching these documentaries will eventually lead the viewer to the big question - who created the Universe and why? Neil Tyson said on one of his podcasts that he does not believe in god as the creator. That's fine. Religions are Earth created doctrines with their own stories and purposes.
I will leave it here with a quote from Dr. Carl Sagan's book 'The Pale Blue Dot' describing the picture of Earth taken from Voyager.
?ÿ
Look again at that dot. That??s here. That??s home. That??s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ??superstar,?? every ??supreme leader,?? every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there ?? on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
Heresay:
Either there is a god or there isn't, both possibilites are frightful, because if there is a God then we better find out who he is, and find out what he wants and do what he says. If there is no God then we are in trouble, because we are hurdling into space at 66,000 miles an hour and nobody is in charge.
Or, "She"
@nate-the-surveyor Surely there is God. All we have to do is look around.?ÿ
Romans 1:20
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse
Most people grow up with a very inaccurate mental picture of the solar system, probably due to the books with a picture of the planets all displayed in the same frame.
Locally, the astronomy club and others some years ago put up a true scale model solar system. It's on the order of maybe 1: 1 billion. I'm describing from memory so may be off a little, but you will get the idea.
It starts in a small college town with a disk to represent the sun, maybe a meter or 4 ft in diameter. You walk up the street to a plaque with a dot for Mercury. Maybe another block is a plaque with Venus, less than a centimeter or?ÿ US dime. Then Earth another block, size similar to Venus. Mars is in front of the fire station, is that a block and a half? Jupiter is on the way out of town no bigger than the size of a US quarter. A mile or more on to Saturn, miles to Uranus, and maybe 4 or 5 miles out of town is Pluto looking like a BB shot. Other stars are not represented in this model becauseAlpha Centauri would be in Earth orbit.
@bill93 cause there??s bugger all down here on Earth.
Overwhelmed by the univer$e I $ee
After a $ip of wine or three
I rai$e my gla$$
To what a pain in the a$$
One tiny little chigger can be.
Heard on NPR recently: "Our universe is like one slice of bread in a cosmic loaf". So if you think you have your head around how big the universe is, you're just beginning. There's no point in thinking about it.?ÿ ?ÿ?ÿ
Somewhere around the time we were learning in school about the Universe and our inability to know much about it we were also discussing cells and atoms and our inability to know much about them.?ÿ This led a certain little country boy to wonder if within every atom there is a tiny Universe being viewed by itsy bitsy little people on some planet within that Universe.?ÿ Thus, we are those itsy bitsy little people inside an atom of a far larger Universe than we can possibly imagine.?ÿ Within that Universe, then, there were gigantic people staring into an even more massive Universe.
Perhaps I should have put in a phone call to Rod Serling suggesting an idea for a Twilight Zone episode.
Some years back my brother gave me a night vision scope, old tech, pump it up and everything you see through it takes on a greenish hue. Out for a walk with the dog one dark, starry winter night, I looked up to the heavens using that night vision scope and had my mind simply blown. What looked like clouds of stars to feint to make out any individual star in a portion of the sky, were enhanced to where I could make out what seemed like trillions of stars, each with their own constellations orbiting them, their light too old and weak to make out with the naked eye, revealing stars too numerous to count, like counting the grains of sand on a beach. A very humbling experience.?ÿ
Hell, when you're as close to the "end of the line" as me the Universe takes last place on my list. It's hard enough in the grocery store trying to figger out if I'll outlive a bunch of green bananas or not. ?????ÿ
