Ack ack ======🔫
ACK ACK ACK!
The sun is actually pretty small. Do a comparison between the sun and some of the bigger stars, then we’ll see just how insignificant we really are.
Years ago I was on 2C-B and lounging about in my brother’s room, staring at a big glowing plastic moon I had bought for him as a joke, when somehow the word and concept of it sent me spiraling down a rabbit hole of cosmic realization. At first the moon (or perhaps my thoughts surrounding the moon) began to rotate like a planetary body, becoming a parent star in a galactic arm, and eventually the central mass of a galaxy itself, ever turning with long tendril arms orbiting around its perimeter.
As the question of it grew, it became the universe itself, on a profoundly metaphysical level, and I came to the realization that every single living organism, both here and elsewhere in the cosmos, are not so much a part or some greater plan or design, but are instead just individual cells and appendages of recently awakened universe. One that has blinked its eyes from a deep sleep and has slowly become self-aware. And just as a child born blind will at some point use their hands and discover they have a body for the first time, we are tiny (but not insignificant) appendages of that universe discovering and exploring itself, trying to make sense or what it even is.
I found immense comfort in the idea that there is no greater meaning to everything than that. We’re just a part of something bigger that is at this very moment trying to make sense of itself, and I don’t need more than that.
I am the result of 14 billion years of cosmic evolution.
I am a thermodynamic miracle.
I am the waking universe looking back at itself.
Yeah but I get to be pretty and kiss girls how much more significant could life be
I’m insignificant?
Oh, thank God
“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.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Beautiful … thanks for posting this … Carl Sagan has always been and will always be a great inspiration for me
You’re welcome
Such a weird mentality. Why would being small make us any less significant than something large? Why would being large make us any more significant than something small? Silly.
On Mars? TIL
LONG LIVE MCR!
I wonder if the flag was updated after what happened to Deimos.
I sure love living in a burning planet where I have to pay taxes to pedophiles who want to send me to a concentration camp.
Wrong. The arrow points to Mars, not to Earth.
This meme isn’t directed toward humans.
Cocky-ass martians smh
Where’s Marvin when you need him?
Brain the size of a planet and you ask me stuff like this? Call that job satisfaction? Cuz I don’t.
I think he meant Marvin the Marian (the loony tune), not Marvin the robot
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a weiner!
So it’s a message from the future specifically for Elon Musk.
His Roadster is beckoning…
Yeah, that’s kinda weird
I assume this in regard to the possible evidence of life on mars, recently announced.
I’ll go with Occam’s razor instead and say that’s just a small mistake 😛
It was made for the colonists
british empire. i gotcha.
I’m here to drink tea and create future independence days, and I’m all out of tea.
Getting a lot of memes with errors like this lately.
Interaction bait bleed over from commercial social media.
That’s the only reason I opened this post; i.e., it may be “engagement bait,” a recent online trend.
It’s “AI” what do you expect?
/s
Joke’s on you, I’m zaphod beeblebrox
You need to cut back on the pan galactic gargle blasters mate
Zaphod’s just this guy, you know.
He’s a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is
Was hoping someone would do this.
Infinite improbability drive means it’s already been done, we’re just dropping by to take a look, really
Let me introduce you to UY Scuti.
Upvoted for linking Wikipedia and not some shitty YT video.
You can’t get to this star in Elite Dangerous, but you can get to VY Canis Majoris which is 1420 radii
the view from the planet there is astonishing
what is the minimum and maximum size of a star? i.e. what is the minimum mass to ignite hydrogen fusion or whatever generates heat, and what is the maximum size where it just collapses into a black hole?
The minimum is about 80 Jupiter Masses. Smaller than that and you can’t start fusing.
Maximum size is harder to answer. It’s determined by the Eddington Limit. Which describes the luminosity at which radiation pressure is enough to overcome gravity for a certain mass.
It’s thought that the maximum mass of a star is somewhere around 150 solar masses, but there’s some evidence to contradict this, as we’ve seen a handful of very old stars with masses or luminosities higher than they should be.
Reported for doxing
You live on mars?
Must be a guy. Probably trying to figure out how to get to Venus.
getting to venus isn’t difficult. lifting off of it again is the challenge, because the atmosphere is so thick, it’s essentially a prison.
Found the Perseverance account