The casket, wide, unwavering
oh, a resting place
FIELD SCHOOL WILL KICK NORTHERN PHILIPPINE ASS
“I am not always very sure of completely existing, and sometimes I think I feel a great fatigue accumulated from having lived too much. Anyhow, I do not know, and I could not, like you, say, “I possess the past.” Never mind! Sadness is not unhealthy. It often seems to me that it prevents us from drying up.”
— George Sand, from a letter to Gustave Flaubert dated 22 November 1866 (via violentwavesofemotion)
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I’m going to refrain from the initial response that comes to mind… actually, no I won’t — they’re really, really, really big!!!! </Kermit arms>
Ok, now that that’s out of the way check out this graphic by Arecibo astrophysicist Rhys Taylor, which neatly illustrates the relative sizes of 25 selected galaxies using images made from NASA and ESA observation missions… including a rendering of our own surprisingly mundane Milky Way at the center for comparison.
(Warning: this chart may adversely affect any feelings of bigness you may have once held dear.)
According to Taylor on his personal blog, Physicists of the Caribbean (because he works at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico) “Type in ‘asteroid sizes’ into Google and you’ll quickly find a bunch of images comparing various asteroids, putting them all next to each at the same scale. The same goes for planets and stars. Yet the results for galaxies are useless. Not only do you not get any size comparisons, but scroll down even just a page and you get images of smartphones, for crying out loud.”
That big bright blur in the center? That’s IC 1101, the largest known galaxy — in this instance created by scaling up an image of M87, another supersized elliptical galaxy that just happens to be considerably closer to our own (and thus has had clearer images taken of it.) But the size is right — IC 1101 gargantuan. At an estimated 5.5 million light-years wide, over 50 Milky Ways could fit across it!
And considering it takes our Solar System about 225 million years to complete a single revolution around the Milky Way… well… yeah. Galaxies are big. Really, really, really, really big!
(via universetoday) (http://zoom.it/qbvd)
“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”
— Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (via the-winter-of-our-discontent)
The Shapes of Stories by Kurt Vonnegut - based on Vonnegut’s Masters Thesis in Anthropology.
There is nothing inherently wrong in not caring. Just make sure your apathy is situated properly in your mind, defended by your ideals, not because you are ignorant.
