We are here
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8zrlOGKI2E
...and we worry about what clothes to wear today.
Seriously, think about what those links show you. Turn off your TV and stereo, take a little while away from distraction, and consider it. All this grandeur, absolutely extravagant in it's fine detail. Think of it, whole galaxy clusters made of mere atoms! Clouds of stars containing in their invisible reaches of space trees and bacteria, you and me! To have created a single atom would have been enough. Where before there was nothing, now, a holy something. That alone could have astonished God so much as to find his creation complete. But instead, we have galaxies and solar systems spinning in infinity, millions of species evolved from a single prehistoric cell that once blindly groped its way through an empty sea.
The telescope and the microscope are gifts to humanity, and we should take a moment to thank their long dead inventors. On the one hand, we got a major demotion, no longer the center of it all, not even of our own solar system. The cosmos expanded beyond any glimmer of understanding. Then the bottom fell out, as microscopic worlds of paramecia, bacteria, and later atoms and quarks became apparent. Who are we amid all this?
I'll tell you what. We are everything. We and everything around us is made of stardust, the ashes of a dead star. We are made up of those atoms, we are a civilization of cells, all grown from a single one in the womb, and earlier, in the sea. We grow ourselves, it's our finest work. All the matter that we see and that we are is pure energy condensed into particles, energy vibrating slow and stable. We look up at the stars, and if we feel small, we can still feel a part of it, for we are. We all came from the same place, are made of the same stuff. We're entitled to see it, feel wonder at it; we're lucky.
Now we know how small we are. But we also know that we are a very finely crafted detail amid a great vastness. From a galaxy's perspective, a cell, a human, is an impossibility, an absurdity. We're invisible to it. We don't matter in the slightest. But we're here, and in an incredibly intricate way. The only thing that should shrink to insignificance is our problems and fears. Created out of nothing, evolved through timescales out of understanding, detailed down to the smallest levels, we are here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8zrlOGKI2E
...and we worry about what clothes to wear today.
Seriously, think about what those links show you. Turn off your TV and stereo, take a little while away from distraction, and consider it. All this grandeur, absolutely extravagant in it's fine detail. Think of it, whole galaxy clusters made of mere atoms! Clouds of stars containing in their invisible reaches of space trees and bacteria, you and me! To have created a single atom would have been enough. Where before there was nothing, now, a holy something. That alone could have astonished God so much as to find his creation complete. But instead, we have galaxies and solar systems spinning in infinity, millions of species evolved from a single prehistoric cell that once blindly groped its way through an empty sea.
The telescope and the microscope are gifts to humanity, and we should take a moment to thank their long dead inventors. On the one hand, we got a major demotion, no longer the center of it all, not even of our own solar system. The cosmos expanded beyond any glimmer of understanding. Then the bottom fell out, as microscopic worlds of paramecia, bacteria, and later atoms and quarks became apparent. Who are we amid all this?
I'll tell you what. We are everything. We and everything around us is made of stardust, the ashes of a dead star. We are made up of those atoms, we are a civilization of cells, all grown from a single one in the womb, and earlier, in the sea. We grow ourselves, it's our finest work. All the matter that we see and that we are is pure energy condensed into particles, energy vibrating slow and stable. We look up at the stars, and if we feel small, we can still feel a part of it, for we are. We all came from the same place, are made of the same stuff. We're entitled to see it, feel wonder at it; we're lucky.
Now we know how small we are. But we also know that we are a very finely crafted detail amid a great vastness. From a galaxy's perspective, a cell, a human, is an impossibility, an absurdity. We're invisible to it. We don't matter in the slightest. But we're here, and in an incredibly intricate way. The only thing that should shrink to insignificance is our problems and fears. Created out of nothing, evolved through timescales out of understanding, detailed down to the smallest levels, we are here.
posted by Brandon at 10:27 AM
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