Insignificance
One of my favorite pictures of all time is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. I could sit and stare at it for hours. It's a picture taken by the telescope that covers an area of space about 1/10th the size of the moon, and it focuses on empty space (empty to us anyways). It contains 10,000+ galaxies. Using this number it has been calculated that there are about 10^11 galaxies in the universe and roughly 10^23 stars in the universe. That's 1,000,000,000,000 galaxies and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So even if 1 out of 1 million galaxies has one planet with life, then that's still 1,000,000 galaxies with life, and if 1 out of 1 billion stars has a planet with life, then that's still 1,000,000,000,000 stars with planets with life.
Just think, everyone you've ever known, every war you've learned about, everything you've ever heard about ever, took place on ONE of those little pieces of rock hurtling around a star. Kinda makes everything you do and everything you know seem kind of unimportant, doesn't it? You're one in 6 billion people, circling around 1 of a billion billion stars, in one of a billion galaxies...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg
Just think, everyone you've ever known, every war you've learned about, everything you've ever heard about ever, took place on ONE of those little pieces of rock hurtling around a star. Kinda makes everything you do and everything you know seem kind of unimportant, doesn't it? You're one in 6 billion people, circling around 1 of a billion billion stars, in one of a billion galaxies...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg
