Folks,


An edited repost from FB, commenting on the reality that we are but bits of old stars born of bits of atoms, space, and time. The fellow who prompted my extemporaneous explateration noted that when we handed a coin over a store counter for change or a tip, we were exchanging star stuff.


S


"There is the fact that we are the dust of a Supernova, holding the dust of a supernova in a silly coin while standing on the dust of a supernova.

Like the old lady said to the physicist, "Hey, buddy, it's turtles all the way up and down."

We are, however, privileged to live in a day hoped for by Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato and their ilk at the dawn of "modern" thinking. Today, some folks are good enough at math and have the scientific instruments to peer across time and space toward the very edge of our Universe. From this perspective, we might soon even glimpse other Universes. This is a literal, scientific possibility. (String Theory, the LHC Experiment)

Wow! Think about this for a moment. It took us Humans about 200,000 years from our specie's birth to create a clan of families. It then only took another few thousand years to make a village. Then, just a while later we made the first little cities, about 10,000 years ago. We swiftly made city states, and thence on to nations. Today, we are reckoning with forging one Human world, lest we perish… yeah, along this path we also created war and a weapon that can literally destroy a planet.

The stakes are high, even as we swiftly, over the course of less than half a millennia of refining physics and engineering, stand in the face of the edge of the Universe… or, perhaps our doom, but hopefully our redemption.

For all I know, we live on a world that is a petri dish, an experiment left behind by another species, or maybe we're just an example of what happens when you contaminate a pristine, barren planet in the right place around its home star with certain chemicals. Whatever. Here we are and this is a beautiful moment to learn all that we can about Everything, and maybe make a difference. What else is there to do?"

What You Get When Protons Collide