Astrophysics must be really depressing
The universe is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the pharmacy, but that's just peanuts to space.
A human in relation to the Earth is tiny, as in can't even see them. Throw the Earth next to the sun and suddenly the Earth is small black dot next to this massive ball of fire. Zoom out to the next star over and that massive ball of fire becomes a pin prick of light. Pull away to edges of the galaxy and you're lucky if you can pick out the general area where those two pinpricks of light might be. Traverse the massive inky blackness of intergalactic space, where it will take you millions of years moving at the speed of light to reach the nearest galaxy, and you'll see our entire galaxy of billions of pinpricks becomes nothing more than a hazy blob in the sky. Finally pull back out and you see a collection of these blobs huddled together in a massive void so expansive that the void between those blobs becomes less than a skip away.
It gets worse.
You see all that massive distance, all those massive objects that suddenly get really really tiny, all that you can see and touch and feel and imagine, is only about 4% of all the matter in the universe. The rest of it you cannot see nor ever interact with, even though it makes up almost all that is creation. A creation that has existed for so long that we have not had a chance to even be noticed by the forces at work. A creation that has existed millions of times longer than even our evolutionary ancestors, and will remain here a hundred million times longer than that. A hundred million million million years after we have gone, turned to dust, and our star faded and boiled away.
So imagine that somewhere, in the midst of unfathomable emptiness, is a tiny glowing group of blobs, and within one of those blobs is a billion pin pricks of light, and around one of those pin pricks is a bunch of tiny black dots, and on one of the tiniest dots are two invisible specks, you and me.
And that's all we have, isn't it? All we have to make that emptiness bearable as we huddle on our speck circling a pinprick is each other for company, lest we end up alone, howling at the emptiness.
So, dear fellow insignificant speck, how about we get ice cream, enjoy the sun, tell jokes and stories, laugh and play, and enjoy what we can for our fraction of a blink of a cosmic eye? Because really, it's all we have, and it's all we need.
A human in relation to the Earth is tiny, as in can't even see them. Throw the Earth next to the sun and suddenly the Earth is small black dot next to this massive ball of fire. Zoom out to the next star over and that massive ball of fire becomes a pin prick of light. Pull away to edges of the galaxy and you're lucky if you can pick out the general area where those two pinpricks of light might be. Traverse the massive inky blackness of intergalactic space, where it will take you millions of years moving at the speed of light to reach the nearest galaxy, and you'll see our entire galaxy of billions of pinpricks becomes nothing more than a hazy blob in the sky. Finally pull back out and you see a collection of these blobs huddled together in a massive void so expansive that the void between those blobs becomes less than a skip away.
It gets worse.
You see all that massive distance, all those massive objects that suddenly get really really tiny, all that you can see and touch and feel and imagine, is only about 4% of all the matter in the universe. The rest of it you cannot see nor ever interact with, even though it makes up almost all that is creation. A creation that has existed for so long that we have not had a chance to even be noticed by the forces at work. A creation that has existed millions of times longer than even our evolutionary ancestors, and will remain here a hundred million times longer than that. A hundred million million million years after we have gone, turned to dust, and our star faded and boiled away.
So imagine that somewhere, in the midst of unfathomable emptiness, is a tiny glowing group of blobs, and within one of those blobs is a billion pin pricks of light, and around one of those pin pricks is a bunch of tiny black dots, and on one of the tiniest dots are two invisible specks, you and me.
And that's all we have, isn't it? All we have to make that emptiness bearable as we huddle on our speck circling a pinprick is each other for company, lest we end up alone, howling at the emptiness.
So, dear fellow insignificant speck, how about we get ice cream, enjoy the sun, tell jokes and stories, laugh and play, and enjoy what we can for our fraction of a blink of a cosmic eye? Because really, it's all we have, and it's all we need.