I often wonder about abstract things like “who am I?”, “what is my purpose on this planet? Am I just a manifestation of the innate desire of a biological species to propagate itself?”…just random thoughts like that!
And driven by these thoughts, I sometimes come across gems like this following video:
“The Known Universe”.
Video by American Museum of Natural History, hosted on youtube.com
Add to this the following quote by Carl Sagan, and the perspective is immensely awe-inspiring:
NASA / Wikipedia
Look again at that (pale blue) dot. 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…
…Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Be humbled!
