This is my personal website where I talk about a whole load of different stuff, from 
While I was out and about this evening, I was fortunate enough to be driving along as the Sun set in the sky. Straight in front of me it shone, very low (and large) in the sky and for some reason (perhaps the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcanic eruption lately, or just the fact that it was so low that the atmosphere filtered some of it's intensity out), I could stare straight at it.
It was amazing - here I was, tootling along in my car, living my life, doing my thing and in a couple of inches of view ahead of me, was over a million miles worth of burning, boiling, beautiful, floating light. A million miles. That's a long, long way! Think about it; you probably only get about 150,000 miles out of the life of your car and it takes you 10 years to travel them. Think about how far you travel in ten years in your car up and down the motorways, to the shops, on holidays... this was ten times that distance, visible straight in front of me, and I imagined a line barely reaching a quarter of the way across. That's how far I'd have driven.
It makes you think, you know, this beautiful ball of light is floating around in the empty darkness of space about 95 million miles away from where you live your life. There's barely anything in between, and it sometimes looks like you could just reach out and touch it. Perhaps the human mind is incapable of comprehending such distances, but I know that while I was looking at this amazing spectacle, I felt extremely insignificant.
And insignificant I am. We all are. We're tiny little ants in the massive black farm we call the Universe, and sadly being so small we'll never see most of it. Check out this video which puts a sense of scale on things.
So, since I'll never see most of the amazing wonders this Universe contains, I'll have to make the most of the ones I can see, and enjoy my insignificance as much as I can.
As long as I get to see the Sun like I did tonight, it's not that hard to do.
Add your comment to the 1 that's been made so far:
Both fields are required.
minxlj
Such distances and scales are incomprehensible to the human mind at times, yet a few incredible people manage to ponder this as a career. The scientists at CERN and NASA for example, scare the crap out of me - I can read Stephen Hawking and Feynman, and manage to understand it, but I can't get my head around HOW someone arrived at the conclusion of m-theory requiring 11 dimensions, or the ease at which some of these people work out particle collision on a day-to-day basis. That makes me feel like we're even smaller in the universe.And now my brain is on a thinking-about-the-universe trip, my head is going to hurt :)
