Life, the age of the universe, how insignificant we are
- Thread starter GK4Herd
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The reality is that the laws of physics likely make it impossible for us to ever visit it. Like the Star Trek warp speed example in the slide, even with the ability to travel faster than light...something that Einstein says is impossible...the reality is that the magnitude of distance makes traveling even to some of our closer star systems exceed our life expectancy. We live in an unconscionably large universe. Believing we hold significance is both arrogant and depressing.
Religion in 3...2...1...
The Hubble Deep Field is my computer wallpaper at work...just to remind me that it doesn't mean shit if I have a bad day at work.
When Carl Sagan talked NASA into turning around the camera of Voyager 1 when it was near Neptune and taking the "Pale Blue Dot" photo, his description was poignant...
"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.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
We look for methane based life as well. But you are correct...life doesn't necessarily have to follow the same path as it did on earth.
https://www.popsci.com/heres-what-methane-based-life-titan-could-look
Don't tell rifle that he's insignificant. You'll have to deal with an 8 paragraph onslaught of how you are insignificant, but he isn't.
Don't tell Banker that Earth isn't a circle, doesn't have the sun revolve around it, and that it isn't "fixed" and "immovable." You'll have to deal with him ignoring it, because it goes against his religious book.
Kansas...I loved that song...dust on the lens...all we are is dust on the lens...
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