I also like the "Pale Blue Dot in a ray of light" taken by Voyager 1. Along with Carl Sagan's accompanying narrative, that picture always humbles me completely.

It was once said our entire universe may be no more than a piece of lint on some gargantuan policeman's coat. Now that ought to give you some real perspective. Time is infinite so I guess size may be too. Which ought to make us all feel insecure about our penises.

Several years ago, a friend and I were camping on the desert in Utah. The night was exceptionally clear and still, and the seeing was nearly perfect. We were sitting on the edge of a canyon, dangling our feet into space and watching the sea of stars wheel overhead. It was his first experience with desert camping, and he was marveling at how many stars he could see. Suddenly, my friend whispered, "What the hell is THAT?" and pointed toward a bright, silvery object in the sky. I said, "It's the Andromeda Galaxy." He asked, "Is that ALWAYS there??" I said that it was, but that you needed dark skies or binoculars in order to see more than just the central core. He said, "That's a galaxy? Like a DIFFERENT galaxy?" I said, "Yup. Different galaxy." He was silent for fifteen or twenty minutes, just staring. I could see him working very hard to get a handle on this new, weird universe that he had suddenly been thrust into. The night was getting chilly, so I stood up to move around a little. I said, "You know, Dave, the sun is a star." He turned to me, wide-eyed, and said, "I know. I guess I just never thought about what that meant. This whole thing is sort of freaking me out. I can't believe I came this far in life without realizing what a weird place this is." I said, "What, the universe?" He said, "Yeah. Everything."

Yeah, everything is right. Sometimes it's good to remind yourself of that.

I believe clearthinker is alone.

Neil de Grasse Tyson had a very similar observation when he gave a presentation at the Beyond Belief 2006 conference.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJOpDLjpSYI
at 4:25 into the clip

There are people who say. "This makes me feel small, because I need to see the immensity of the cosmos." But I say "No, you are not thinking about it the right way." By the way, when we opened our facility, I got a letter from a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania. He had seen our show which was a zoom out from Earth and it shrinks to nothingness as you go to the edge of the universe. He wrote me a letter that said, "I specialize in the psychological effects of things that make people feel insignificant." I thought, bummer of a job. Is that what you do for a living? He said, "Needless to say, your show was the greatest eliciter of smallness that I have ever seen. Will you allow me to conduct a survey on the people who visit your show?"
I thought to myself - there is something wrong here. Why does he feel small? When I look up in the universe, I feel large. Then I realized his ego was too large to begin with. He came to the problem thinking too highly of who and what he was to begin with. Everything that happened in the show destabilized his self image. Where as I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos - and it is our 15 lbs of gray matter and figured this out. There is a kinship with the cosmos... Not only are we in the universe, the universie is in us.

Despite the estimated 100,000,000 galaxies within 13.7 million light years from us, despite the estimated 100,000,000 average number of stars in each of these galaxies, despite all that stuff that dwarfs the earth, I get lonely when I think of our universe.

It's empty almost everywhere, it's extremely cold despite all those stars, and it's so damn big. I remember one of those (required) middle school science projects years ago for one of my kids. I was "encouraging" said kid to think about the dimensions of our solar system. If we wanted to draw a picture of the earth and sun to scale, and if we wanted the earth to be as large as a five cent nickel, and if put the earth at one edge of an 11 x 8 piece of paper (landscape mode), then we needed another 850 or so sheets of paper to get to the sun. (I hope my arithmetic is correct.)

Now the nearest star to our sun is about a quarter of a million times further from the earth than the earth is to the sun. Using current technology we humans probably can't even get to Mars alive. Even with all those sci-fi thrust mechanisms (that don't violate the speed of light), we, that is, our human bodies, probably could never get to the nearest star (alive). So we are alone in our bountiful universe -- regardless of whatever else is out there.

Lastly, if current dark energy theories with their negative gravitational effects are correct, then the universe itself will disappear (expand) into the hardest vacuum imaginable in accelerated fashion. There will be nothing in a few trillion years. So enjoy your time here on earth, and please, please, take care of it. It's all we have.

I'll freely admit that I'm a glass-half-empty sort when it comes to things like this. It's not that I feel extremely special and so my insignificance is hard to swallow, but as Vonnegut said, "Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel."

It makes me feel special. It makes me realize the uniqueness of the beauty of the world around me. The Earth. Human evolution. Human empathy.

Hold on. With that many star systems, chances are, there are other life forms out there. Maybe even sentient life-forms. So shouldn't it make us feel less special?

Or as Don Draper said on Mad Men: "There is no big lie, the universe is indifferent".

Trippy dude.

You're a pretty awesome person, CT.

Thanks for this post and the photos, CT.

I'm with you--I feel special when I contemplate the enormity of the universe. This feeling is at the core of my spirituality. There's a feeling of gratitude and a thrill at being a part of something so enormous and beautiful and dynamic. I exist! We exist!

Faith, for me, is a belief that not only do we exist within the context of a larger, grander "whole" of some sort, but that we are also important, crucial parts of this "whole." Each thing that exists is as important and crucial as every other thing that exists. Does that give you a thrill?? It gives me one!

Everything else about my spirituality spins out from this essential core.

There are three things I can only get occasional flashes of clarity/insight on.

Staring into the night sky: the enormous vastness of this place.

Contemplating the rock in my hand: the enormous age of this place.

Looking at the clouds floating over: the enormous beauty of this place.

that search doesn't work, best is going direct to his website: philborges.com