When I am angry, frustrated and disappointed or depressed, I think of the pale blue dot every single time. It helps me put things into perspective. Our little knotted lives and our petty concerns are meaningless and inconsequential in grand scheme of things. Just let it go. Enjoy what little time we have here!
I was visiting Chabot Space Center in Oakland several years ago and saw a large poster on a wall which had thousands and thousands of star-like dots filling the entire sky.
Except, they were not stars, they were galaxies. A poster of a small portion of the sky full of thousands and thousands of galaxies, each looking like a dot, as small as a star looks in the night sky, and each of those galaxies has billions of stars...
Something snapped in my brain that day and I went on from being somewhat religious/agnostic to a full blown atheist.
The crazy thing is the amount of stuff we are able to observe is constantly shrinking. As the universe expands faster and faster, eventually the stuff at the far edges is moving away faster than the speed of light so we will never get there or even know it exists without records.
For me it worked in the opposite direction, the more I learned how all the World elements are connected, how laws of Physics made live possible, how those laws are connected with the logical rules that our World has to obey (like causality) the more I become convinced that all this had to be designed.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1)
That's cool. I hope you can find and be satisfied with the materialistic explanation of the sheer awe you are feeling when you think about all these galaxies.
Jokes aside, atheism is a religion (as in fundamentalist belief system), and not a nice one either. Being agnostic probably keeps your mind more flexible [citation needed].
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”
Firstly, contrary to Benatar, our lives are not "meaningless", even from a cosmic perspective. Our personal problems, concerns, relationships, and feelings are in no way less significant merely in the virtue of the size of the (multi)verse. Your feeling of pain is still pain, whether the universe contains billions of galaxies, or is just 10 light-years across. Same with joy, same with health, everything.
Secondly, our lives are certainly not inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. The whole future of the Sun depends on whether humanity's descendants exist long enough to develop the technology to stop it from going nova and gather its energy. If Earth is indeed the only planet in the observable universe to contain life, then our lives are of tremendous significance. Either we live and hopefully, build grand Kardashev IV-utopia among the stars changing the universe completely, or we go extinct.
Somehow preventing our sun to swell into a red giant is also only a short term and meaningless problem in the grand scheme of things. You would have to prevent the heat death of the universe if you want human mankind to exist forever or accept that things will eventually come to an end.
Totally agree. I bought a telescope as a hobby, but really, it also acts as a mental health booster. We are just specks of dust in an infinite galactic soup. I didn't expect this side effect when I bought it!
Telescopes are one thing, but there is an impressive amount of stuff out there in "plain sight" that is invisible because it is too far at the edge of the visible spectrum, or too dim.
I've been recently doing a project to photograph a lot of these massive interstellar objects in the perspective of landscapes to show how visually big they are. For example, here's a picture I took of the Rosette Nebula rising over Mt. Shasta. The nebula is visually bigger than a full moon, you just can't see it easily with the naked eye: https://www.instagram.com/p/CCO0CmnnVkA/
I don't know I've always found this line of thinking bullshit.
First the only thing you will eperience is your own life. The only things that should "matter" by definition is the thing you can have influence on and will be important for your life. Why something you can't have influence on (space) should matter in how I make decisions ?
I agree with the general, bigger line to not get too much stress about random stuff, but in that case I prefer the line of thinking that short term problem are usually meaning less compared to the duration of of your life, than trying to justify it by the fact that "a universe exists".
Sorry for the use of "bullshit" if you're the kind to be offended by that
This method used to work for me, but i don't know lately it's barely even touch my feeling about the very vast universe, and how tiny and unsignificant we are.
Because the universe around us is unreachable, for a long time coming. It simply does not matter to our daily life that we are insignificant. We can observe, explore and expand knowledge. But never touch the surface of any other planet or feel the warmth of another star. Your neighbor matters more to your life than the Andromeda galaxy.
Not even the closest star changes or affects life on Earth in time scales relevant to us. For all intents and purposes we are an isolated microcosmos, save maybe some astronomic catastrophes unlikely to happen within humanity's span of existence (which isn't even a single million years yet).
We made something similar a couple years ago that zoomed out from earth and showed you what you'd be listening to if you tuned into radio waves lightyears from the planet.
Ironically we who fought IE6 are partially responsible for this: if we hadn't done that Chrome wouldn't had a fighting chance and we had all had to deal with whatever Microsoft prescribed insteas ;-)
On a more serious note: if we allow the Chrome monoculture to continue I guess it will prevent the next big breakthrough for the web just like IE6 held back the web for years.
For those who doubt: Do you really believe Google will allow their developers to waste time on the browser once they own the market alone or do you think they will finally remove ad blocking and then go to maintenance mode?
It is now our turn to fight again just like we did against IE6:
- relentlessly bug any organization who creates websites or libraries that doesn't work across all modern browsers
- keep suggesting regulators look into the massive market position abuse that allowed Chrome to become as dominant as it is
- keep poking at Mozilla to remind them fix Firefox (it is still awesome but sadly a shadow of it former self on the extension side)
- keep reminding developers that this is about professionalism and also too important to leave to PMs and execs.
Finally: remember, when we started the fight against IE6 it was in many ways superior, in some ways more than Chrome today.
> Ironically we who fought IE6 are partially responsible for this
There is some truth to this, but in a different way: after IE6 was "beaten", it started falling behind in terms of features and the web dev community as a whole (myself included) started caring less and less about IE compatibility, I suspect partially because we disliked IE on principle.
Fast-forward to Chrome's launch and it felt in many ways like going from IE to Firefox. Devs started dropping FF support just like they did with IE, not entirely realising, that the situation was much different: whereas the first time, we were going from a worse closed browser to a better open one, we were now abandoning a worse open one for a better closed one.
I'm of course not blaming this on the web community. The open-source license of Chromium made the switch feel safer, but despite the code license, the decision-making process behind the browser is far from open. Now that I think about it, this is starting to sound familiar... Something about Embracing..and Extending, with a third E-word rising up at the horizon, but I can't make it out quite yet.....
The scroll wheel and navigation don't work at all on Firefox.
Looking at the source it's using three.js 62. That's from 7 years ago. This explains a lot.
What's happening is that back in 2013 Chrome and IE used the non-standard 'MouseWheelEvent' while Firefox used the at-the-time-non-standard-but-is-the-standard-now 'WheelEvent'. Chrome 31 switched from MouseWheelEvent to WheelEvent[+], but that came out in Nov 2013, so when this was written it required some additional code to do cross-browser mouse wheel events (jquery.mousewheel.js in this page's code). Presumably something in that jquery plugin is still trying to do browser API detection and fires the old Firefox wheelEvent rather than the new standard version.
It's a shame no one from Google went back and maintained the code for this really, but we all know how Googlers feel about maintaining old code. :)
[+] Around 2012/2013 there were actually three competing mousewheel events - mousewheel[1], MouseWheelEvent[2], and WheelEvent[3]. XKCD 927 applies here (https://xkcd.com/927/).
EDIT: Looking at the source of the plugin it also checks for "DOMMouseScroll" and "MozMousePixelScroll". I'm glad we have a standard for this now. Jeez.
Another application in a similar vein is Microsoft's amazing and now-open-source WorldWide Telescope, which also has "guided tours" and will let you drill all the way down to searching professional research on objects of interest.
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Except, they were not stars, they were galaxies. A poster of a small portion of the sky full of thousands and thousands of galaxies, each looking like a dot, as small as a star looks in the night sky, and each of those galaxies has billions of stars...
Something snapped in my brain that day and I went on from being somewhat religious/agnostic to a full blown atheist.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1)
Jokes aside, atheism is a religion (as in fundamentalist belief system), and not a nice one either. Being agnostic probably keeps your mind more flexible [citation needed].
―Edgar Mitchell
Jiddu Krishnamurthy’s 1985 UN speech also resonates here: https://youtu.be/qcga8ATBNh0
Firstly, contrary to Benatar, our lives are not "meaningless", even from a cosmic perspective. Our personal problems, concerns, relationships, and feelings are in no way less significant merely in the virtue of the size of the (multi)verse. Your feeling of pain is still pain, whether the universe contains billions of galaxies, or is just 10 light-years across. Same with joy, same with health, everything.
Secondly, our lives are certainly not inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. The whole future of the Sun depends on whether humanity's descendants exist long enough to develop the technology to stop it from going nova and gather its energy. If Earth is indeed the only planet in the observable universe to contain life, then our lives are of tremendous significance. Either we live and hopefully, build grand Kardashev IV-utopia among the stars changing the universe completely, or we go extinct.
There’s no denying that the heat death of the universe is a pretty depressing idea.
Somehow preventing our sun to swell into a red giant is also only a short term and meaningless problem in the grand scheme of things. You would have to prevent the heat death of the universe if you want human mankind to exist forever or accept that things will eventually come to an end.
And, to nitpick: the sun will never go nova.
I've been recently doing a project to photograph a lot of these massive interstellar objects in the perspective of landscapes to show how visually big they are. For example, here's a picture I took of the Rosette Nebula rising over Mt. Shasta. The nebula is visually bigger than a full moon, you just can't see it easily with the naked eye: https://www.instagram.com/p/CCO0CmnnVkA/
First the only thing you will eperience is your own life. The only things that should "matter" by definition is the thing you can have influence on and will be important for your life. Why something you can't have influence on (space) should matter in how I make decisions ?
I agree with the general, bigger line to not get too much stress about random stuff, but in that case I prefer the line of thinking that short term problem are usually meaning less compared to the duration of of your life, than trying to justify it by the fact that "a universe exists".
Sorry for the use of "bullshit" if you're the kind to be offended by that
Whatever it takes to get there, as long as you can get there.
Not even the closest star changes or affects life on Earth in time scales relevant to us. For all intents and purposes we are an isolated microcosmos, save maybe some astronomic catastrophes unlikely to happen within humanity's span of existence (which isn't even a single million years yet).
http://www.lightyear.fm/
...It's two years out of date but you get the idea!
https://xkcd.com/1212/
I really hope Chrome doesn't become the new IE.
Maybe the DOJ will make Google spin off their browser so the web doesn't become Google's own version of AOL.
Ten more years of this crap and Firefox will be dead.
Too late.
Ironically we who fought IE6 are partially responsible for this: if we hadn't done that Chrome wouldn't had a fighting chance and we had all had to deal with whatever Microsoft prescribed insteas ;-)
On a more serious note: if we allow the Chrome monoculture to continue I guess it will prevent the next big breakthrough for the web just like IE6 held back the web for years.
For those who doubt: Do you really believe Google will allow their developers to waste time on the browser once they own the market alone or do you think they will finally remove ad blocking and then go to maintenance mode?
It is now our turn to fight again just like we did against IE6:
- relentlessly bug any organization who creates websites or libraries that doesn't work across all modern browsers
- keep suggesting regulators look into the massive market position abuse that allowed Chrome to become as dominant as it is
- keep poking at Mozilla to remind them fix Firefox (it is still awesome but sadly a shadow of it former self on the extension side)
- keep reminding developers that this is about professionalism and also too important to leave to PMs and execs.
Finally: remember, when we started the fight against IE6 it was in many ways superior, in some ways more than Chrome today.
- Google is well aware of Internet Explorer's history
- Automatic updates mean that there won't be an IE6 problem
- Google's own web developers will push for new APIs
Assuming that history will repeat seems too simple?
There is some truth to this, but in a different way: after IE6 was "beaten", it started falling behind in terms of features and the web dev community as a whole (myself included) started caring less and less about IE compatibility, I suspect partially because we disliked IE on principle.
Fast-forward to Chrome's launch and it felt in many ways like going from IE to Firefox. Devs started dropping FF support just like they did with IE, not entirely realising, that the situation was much different: whereas the first time, we were going from a worse closed browser to a better open one, we were now abandoning a worse open one for a better closed one.
I'm of course not blaming this on the web community. The open-source license of Chromium made the switch feel safer, but despite the code license, the decision-making process behind the browser is far from open. Now that I think about it, this is starting to sound familiar... Something about Embracing..and Extending, with a third E-word rising up at the horizon, but I can't make it out quite yet.....
-- keep reminding users that Google is literally an advertising company, that makes billions of dollars spying on everyone to sell hyper targeted ads.
Chrome is essentially spyware.
Looking at the source it's using three.js 62. That's from 7 years ago. This explains a lot.
What's happening is that back in 2013 Chrome and IE used the non-standard 'MouseWheelEvent' while Firefox used the at-the-time-non-standard-but-is-the-standard-now 'WheelEvent'. Chrome 31 switched from MouseWheelEvent to WheelEvent[+], but that came out in Nov 2013, so when this was written it required some additional code to do cross-browser mouse wheel events (jquery.mousewheel.js in this page's code). Presumably something in that jquery plugin is still trying to do browser API detection and fires the old Firefox wheelEvent rather than the new standard version.
It's a shame no one from Google went back and maintained the code for this really, but we all know how Googlers feel about maintaining old code. :)
[+] Around 2012/2013 there were actually three competing mousewheel events - mousewheel[1], MouseWheelEvent[2], and WheelEvent[3]. XKCD 927 applies here (https://xkcd.com/927/).
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/mou...
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MouseWheelE...
[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WheelEvent
EDIT: Looking at the source of the plugin it also checks for "DOMMouseScroll" and "MozMousePixelScroll". I'm glad we have a standard for this now. Jeez.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/100000st...
One of my favorite things is to wander around the galaxy in the galaxy-map mode in VR in that game.
my favorite feature is drawing the lines of the constellations joining the stars in 3D (they look all different from the other side!)
Another application in a similar vein is Microsoft's amazing and now-open-source WorldWide Telescope, which also has "guided tours" and will let you drill all the way down to searching professional research on objects of interest.
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/