Know your place
(midwest.social)
Lady Butterfly she/her
Science MemesThe 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.
Ack ack ======š«
ACK ACK ACK!
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.
The 2C family is quite something. I love this thought though, I mean why the hell not
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
āLook 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.ā
ā 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
Wrong. The arrow points to Mars, not to Earth.
This meme isnāt 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 š
Getting a lot of memes with errors like this lately.
Interaction bait bleed over from commercial social media.
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.
Thatās the only reason I opened this post; i.e., it may be āengagement bait,ā a recent online trend.
Itās āAIā what do you expect?
/s
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.
Jokeās on you, Iām zaphod beeblebrox
You need to cut back on the pan galactic gargle blasters mate
Zaphodās 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 itās already been done, weāre 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
It's all relative though. Yes, we're insignificant to the rest of the universe, but...
literally this. there's more cells in each human than there are humans on this planet.
And everyone wants to kill each other over a few grains of that dirtball
And yet we are the only conscious beings on any of these heavenly bodies that are aware enough to give their existence any meaning at all.
Here's the galaxy and our approximate location in this system. To give you an idea of scale .... the galaxy is estimated to be about 100,000 light years across. Meaning that if you could travel at the speed of light (which is impossible), it would still take you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy from edge to edge.
How do you know where I am?
Out of 2 trillion galaxies that we know of? .... it was a lucky guess.
100000 years from an outside perspective, but because of time dilation you could make it take arbitrarily little time from your reference frame.
I liked the character's from Project Hail Mary perspective. The fact that we experience less time the closer we are to the speed of light is almost like an invitation to explore the stars.
Another things that gets me is the time experienced by black holes. We would think of the black hole at the center of the galaxy as some enduring, permanent thing, but with so much gravity, from the black hole's perspective it may only exist for a fraction of a second.
I don't fully understand how the science and theory works around all that ... all I understand is that it is so unbelievably far away that in order to cross any of those distances or even think about crossing those distances, it begins to break our normal understanding of speed, distances and time.
Another great example of both scale and speed. Even the near stars are far.
Yes, itās the unfashionable western spiral arm. We get it.
"If you've done six impossible things today, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways!"
Here's another perspective .... this is our local galactic group. Our nearest galactic neighbor is the Andromeda Galaxy ... it's located about 2 million light years from us. Again, if you could travel at the speed of light (which is impossible), it would still take you 2 million years to get there.
Another way of thinking of it is that the light we see from Andromeda today started it's journey when our first prehistoric human ancestors first evolved in Africa 2 million years ago.
So the light we see from Andromeda today started it's journey when our ancient African ancestors looked like Homo Hablis - estimated to have been around in Africa 2.4 million years ago and looked like this
If you could travel at the speed of light, the only tim it would take you is the time spent speedign up and slowing down. Traveling at the speed of light stops the time for you.
It gets messed up really fast tho ... so if you travelled at the speed of light 2 million light years to Andromeda and it only felt like a few minutes to you ... then you travelled back 2 million light years back to our galaxy and it only felt like a few minutes to you ... wouldn't 4 million years have passed at your start point while you were gone?
Yup, but it's not felt like, it's how much time really passed for you.
Another one I've always liked; suppose two people (or space ships, whatever) are together in the empty space between galaxies. One of you gets a boost from an external actor, and travels 10 lightyears away at the speed of light. After that, the other one gets the same boost and joins the first. So for both, ten years have passed. But, without an external reference, there is no way to know which one moved first.
Epic Spaceman on Youtube had a great scale realization method. If out galaxy was the size of the United States, our solar system would be somewhere around the city of Denver. The neighborhood stars we can individually see with our eyes would be the area of the Denver city lights. The Sun would be the size of a red blood cell, and the solar system's expanse would be the size of a fingerprint.
I always loved those examples that show the scale of planets, stars and systems. I remember years ago before I got on the internet (yes I'm that old), reading a comic or book, I can't remember where ... all I remember is the cartoon and illustration.
If you made a scale model of the galaxy and fit it in between the earth and the moon .... our sun would be the size of a marble and it's nearest neighbour would be about a mile away. And some of the largest stars would be about the size of an average office building.
The problem is that the human mind can't easily grasp the whole thing at one time, or some parts of the scale aren't relatable enough. Like in your example, we know the Earth-Moon distance is huge abstractly but can't hold it in our mind like we can the marble and building, or even a mile distance, as those we can see. Or in The Epic Spaceman one, all we can understand is that the US is a very large expanse of land and yet our system is small even at that scale. But we can't put the two together easily.
When one gets that brief moment of awareness, it's both awesome and frightening. The last time it happened to me out of the blue was as a kid, looking up at a dark sky with a meteor shower. For a second I had the sense not of looking up at the sky with meteors falling, but of the reality of being on the surface of a rock that was flying around running into a debris cloud. And if I'm in a dark sky area and look long enough at the dense star field I can almost feel the sense of insignificance.
The problem is that the human mind can't easily grasp the whole thing at one time
No, that's just you.
Same here ... I had those moments of awareness several times when I was a kid learning about all this stuff in school. Together with my background as an Indigenous Canadian (I'm full blooded Ojibway and it's my first language before English) I was always taught by my elders to stay aware of my place in the universe and existence.
We lived in remote northern Ontario away from cities and towns and the sky was always a deep dark expanse, especially on a moonless night. One of the greatest spectacles I ever witnessed was heading out on the winter ice road near Moosonee on James Bay. My friends and I drove out for fun several miles north for fun. It was February and it was a frigid minus 40, no wind, no clouds, the air perfectly still. We stopped at a bit of a rise in the frozen mushkeg where there were no trees. The sky was so dry, so clear and so unobstructed by anything in the air that we could see every star down to the horizon. At that moment, for an instant realized I wasn't looking up .... I was looking at the universe from the edge of a sphere ... it was almost dizzying because if I thought about it too long, I felt as if I were on the edge of a cliff ready to fall off.
Meaning that if you could travel at the speed of light (which is impossible), it would still take you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy from edge to edge.
It's just highly improbable to cross the galaxy in less than 100 000 years. You just need a device which generates infinite improbability and that'll pass you trough every single point in the universe simultaneously and you can just stop where needed. Side effects may apply.
now imagine how insanely long it would take for any extraterrestrial species to fly through all that and meet us. that might explain why we haven't met any of that yet.
"Hey that's where you live too cunt."
What are the 4 dots after Neptune?
Dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, Eris
There should also be one (Ceres) in Jupiters shadow, right of the planet the arrow is pointing to. Which is Mars and not earth btw ...
Anyone fixating on size this much is definitely compensating for something.
"My turds are the biggest!"
Yeah but what about the economy?
It needs to constantly go up or I'll literally shit my pants and cry like baby.
the economy says that you generate jobs if you develop and push forward spaceflight ...
Martians say: "Fuck off!"
Yes, they speak English. They speak every Earth language and more.
That's fair.
Wow, big shelf though!
No reason to be so mean to J'onn J'onzz you bully.
Fail.
and I will mean infinitely more than them, for I am their creation. The end of their efforts, the unique, the observer and the changer. I am their meaning and they my guarantor.
No, I am THE ENERGY I am everywhere but nowhere
