By Reilly Capps
About the meaning of life, YouTube rarely delivers. But this video below is one of the most beautiful and terrifying and enlightening things you will ever see.
This is a 3D map of our universe, correct in terms of location, size and ratio of all its objects, made by the American Museum of Natural History.
Wasn’t that amazing? And lonely and isolating? It has the effect of putting me on the edge of a cliff. The Earth is out here in the middle of nowhere. You feel like you could fall right off the edge of the world into nothingness, fall as far as light can travel.
The map shows a million things: how empty space is; how small we are; how small our attempts at exploration have been; how impossible it would be to get to other suns, other planets; how even our radio waves haven’t shot out very far; how desolate and empty even our own world is; how little of the universe we’ve actually mapped. Like a car, we have gigantic blind spots. All of us do.
Case in point: A newspaper reporter last month wrote a ridiculous story that said with a straight face that there would be an energy shift on Earth in 2012, because the Earth was moving to the center of the galaxy. Hardly any reader blinked, even though that’s as absurd as saying that the Himalayas will moving to Arizona.
We see where we live, of course: near a mountain that looks big; or an ocean that seems to go on forever, but those are just local landmarks.
This movie is a giant You Are Here sign, and should be shown to infants in their cribs. Along with telling me creation myths about floods and snakes, and stories about Columbus and Washington, I wish somebody had told me, You are on a spiral arm of a galaxy, floating in nothingness, 13 billion years after the birth of a universe.
What would I have made of that? I don’t know. It requires a rejiggering of our thoughts as profound as any we’ve had to undergo in human history. The knowledge of our isolation and insignificance, which we’ve known for only 100 years or so, is every bit as important as the knowledge that we are someday to die.
What do we make of this 3D map that places us in time and space, and places us in the middle of nowhere?
We came up with great stories when we learned about about death. I hope we come up with good stories this time around.
– ReillyCapps@gmail.com.