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A Sense Of Perspective: The Solar System To Scale

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Wed, 2014-03-05 21:22

bibliophile20 bibliophile20's picture

A Sense Of Perspective: The Solar System To Scale

[url=http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html]A map of the solar system, to scale if the Moon were one pixel wide[/url] I feel small...

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"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -Benjamin Franklin

Wed, 2014-03-05 21:57

ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture

Biblio I think we have to

Biblio I think we have to much time on our hands.... Now help me build this warp drive prototype. It takes 2 people to install the fission core.

Thu, 2014-03-06 15:27

consumerdestroyer consumerdestroyer's picture

Feeling small is something we

Feeling small is something we all need a bit of these days. Sagan had the right of it with his "pale blue dot" schtick.

Thu, 2014-03-13 10:38

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Small, but perhaps not

Small, but perhaps not insignificant.

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Thu, 2014-03-13 16:18

consumerdestroyer consumerdestroyer's picture

I think both time scales and

I think both time scales and spatial scales render us pretty darn insignificant. We gotta get pretty geocentric, biocentric, noocentric, anthropocentric and/or egocentric for the significance to ping on any but the most disingenuous radars.

Thu, 2014-03-13 17:15

bibliophile20 bibliophile20's picture

consumerdestroyer wrote:I

consumerdestroyer wrote:
I think both time scales and spatial scales render us pretty darn insignificant. We gotta get pretty geocentric, biocentric, noocentric, anthropocentric and/or egocentric for the significance to ping on any but the most disingenuous radars.

Heh. I remember when I was in college holding a rock in geology lab and calculating that it had experienced a year of existence for each second of my life. And it was one of the younger rocks in the lab... That was a humbling experience.

—

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -Benjamin Franklin

Thu, 2014-03-13 17:44

consumerdestroyer consumerdestroyer's picture

I remember the first time I

I remember the first time I read about the formation of a nebula, and how long the star likely existed before it went red giant and became a nebula, and then I read about star nurseries and how they form...and I mentally checked that against what I knew the age of the Earth to be, and had to go look that up too (along with the age of our solar system's star) because I was struck with an existential nausea and a "No, I have to be remembering wrong." kinda train of thought. That's one of those things I like a lot about growing up in the late 20th century...all this information was available to me during my formative years! I got to self-propel through some existential dread as a preteen that adult astronomers from previous eras could only speculate about! I had scientific certainties (well, relatively anyway) where some specialists in their fields could at least entertain smaller time/space scales as possibilities in years long since past.

Thu, 2014-03-13 17:50

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

consumerdestroyer wrote:I

consumerdestroyer wrote:
I think both time scales and spatial scales render us pretty darn insignificant. We gotta get pretty geocentric, biocentric, noocentric, anthropocentric and/or egocentric for the significance to ping on any but the most disingenuous radars.

Sorry, but this is a category mistake. The fact that we are tiny and transient does not mean we are insignificant. The snowflake that sets an avalanche in motion or the mutation that causes speciation are tiny, but not insignificant for how things turn out. See my always cheerful colleauge Guy Kahane's paper Our Cosmic Insignificance for a professional philosophical take on it. Personally I think we might be the tiny seed that unleashes a roaring phase transition into life and consciousness across the dead universe.

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Thu, 2014-03-13 19:41

ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture

that is assuming we are the

that is assuming we are the first being to come into existence Aren :) however the current state of the fermi paradox supports this

Thu, 2014-03-13 21:34

#10

consumerdestroyer consumerdestroyer's picture

Arenamontanus wrote

Arenamontanus wrote:
consumerdestroyer wrote:
I think both time scales and spatial scales render us pretty darn insignificant. We gotta get pretty geocentric, biocentric, noocentric, anthropocentric and/or egocentric for the significance to ping on any but the most disingenuous radars.
Sorry, but this is a category mistake. The fact that we are tiny and transient does not mean we are insignificant. The snowflake that sets an avalanche in motion or the mutation that causes speciation are tiny, but not insignificant for how things turn out. See my always cheerful colleauge Guy Kahane's paper Our Cosmic Insignificance for a professional philosophical take on it. Personally I think we might be the tiny seed that unleashes a roaring phase transition into life and consciousness across the dead universe.

My [i]hopes[/i] are that we might manage something significant. [i]Likelihood[/i], on the other hand, I find about in the range of the snowflake that starts an avalanche (on a mountain on a planet in a solar system with 5 or 6 billion years left in it that's in one of billions of galaxies). As for abiogenesis to life to speciation, who knows if life as we know it'll even have a surviving space-faring remnant in 6 billion years? Again, it takes a bit of anthropocentrism to ratchet likelihood into rose-tinted hopevision. That said, I'd love to be part of a space-faring push my own self, in large part because I'd like to feel that [i]hope[/i] over the course of my brief existence that I contributed in some minor cog way to a future that allows us seedpotential.

Fri, 2014-03-14 06:51

#11

Holy

I think, I am very much in

I think, I am very much in line of thought that Kahane criticises in his abstract:

Guy Kahane wrote:
Many philosophers assume that such worries about our significance reflect a banal metaethical confusion. They dismiss the very idea of cosmic significance.

I do know that I am very much significant to me, my child and my wife. If I am, or we as a species are, significant to the universe will only be shown by time. In the mean time I am quite busy dealing with the (in)significancies life throws at me: What job to do, where to live, have another child and, for me the most important, what is a good life and how do I live one.

Fri, 2014-03-14 06:52

#12

Holy

By the way: I really enjoyed

By the way: I really enjoyed the solar system map. :-)

Mon, 2014-03-24 19:56

#13

Darkening Kaos Darkening Kaos's picture

My thoughts.....

When first studying astronomy, I found out that anything in our solar system that is not hydrogen was made in the formation, life and then death of another star. Not only that, the material/energy made by the life-to-death of that star had to travel from its corpse until it collided with a cloud of hydrogen dense enough to cause the seeding of a new solar system. How many times did that process have to occur before it resulted in [i]our[/i] solar system? Secondly - the universe is so large and complex that it does not recognise our infinitesimal existence, and yet, the universe's only reason to exist is to screw us over every way it can.

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Your definition of horror is meaningless to me....... I. Am. A Bay12'er.