What a Wonderful World

Today I clicked on the link on that Boston.com Advent calendar that took me to the 2008 version. It was, like the more current version, awesome beyond belief. Amazing pictures of galaxies and supernovas and planets exploding blows my mind every time. Each day brought a cooler picture than the last.

But, what I remember the most about reading through the captions - something I told myself I wouldn't do with the 2009 version until after all the pictures are up - is how small I felt. There was a picture of some gaseous release from some random star, and at the very edge of a gaseous formation was a small, finger-like shape that the author mentioned was twice the size of the Milky Way galaxy. Another picture contained so many galaxy shapes that almost every square inch of the photo was covered in light. According to the author, that grouping of galaxies takes up the amount of space in the sky that could be covered by the tip of a ball point pen held at arms length from your backyard. Every single image contained beautiful galactic formations that exist - or used to exist - over 12 million light years, 15 million light years, 30 million...whatever. That's SO FAR. The very concept of one light year completely blows my mind. Humans as a whole, from past to future, will never notch a combined number of traveled miles to even equal one light year. The only image that didn't require a measurement in light years was the image of Saturn and her rings, which at this time currently sits a cool 19 Billion kilometers from earth. Driving 60 MPH on the highway, that would take roughly 27,200 years to get to.

I remember on Sophomore Road Trip, that epic fail of a retreat if ever there was one, that I took some time out of the evening reflection on the first night to spend some time lying on the sand, looking up at the stars. I was trying to get over a girl at the time - unsuccessfully I might add - and I thought some time to myself to look up at the night sky would provide me with the sense of wonder I needed to realize I was part of something bigger than a failed relationship attempt. Each second, each minute that went by, a new layer of faintly lit objects appeared until the sky seemed as bright as day. Every time I thought I could see all I could see, more appeared, until Orion, my favorite constellation (thanks to Men in Black) disappeared into the entire body of celestial light and stars were backlit by what looked like a long streak of clouds. That, according to someone else on the retreat, was the Milky Way, and our campsite was far enough away from the light polution of the city that we could see it about as well as any human could see it with the naked eye. Wow. It was huge. And come to find out, from a certain perspective that mammoth body of light in the sky only covers half of the size of one of the letters in this post.

I found a great quote by one of the astronomers of the Hubble telescope. He noticed in one frame a star or a supernova known as the Pale Blue Dot, which, as it turns out, looked just like a pale blue dot on a photograph barely bigger than a 12pt punctuation mark. He said this about that star, presumably in light of his entire career.

"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"

What a wonderful world.

__________________________

(No Footnotes)

Th Colour and the Shape

I thank the Foo Fighters for the title of this blog and this post, even if it'll go at the top of my least favorite and least read blog. Their title for their best album¹ serves as a great reminder of what actually makes each person unique and individual. It's their color² and their shape.

And so this blog gives me a forum for my deeper thoughts. When I had a blog before, I used to combine my thoughts on Notre Dame football, my rants on commercials, movies, and music, and my theological/emo musings in one. That didn't work. I'd be hilarious in one minute while going on and on about how stupid Tyrone Willingham's coaching decisions were, and the next minute, following an unhappy interaction with a friend or a saddening time in my life³, I would compose a few poorly written pieces that somehow combined what troubled me with my loosely formed education in theology or my theories about life.

I will do that no more.

Here is my blog for depth - my colour and shape. The content won't be good, but maybe the writing will.

______________________

1. "Everlong" is in my top two favorite songs of all time along with "Smooth" by Santana and Rob Thomas
2. Not like skin color.
3. Read: Valentine's Day