Stargazing

Calvin: If people sat outside and looked at stars each night, I'll be they'd live a lot differently
Hobbes: How so?
Calvin: Well, when you  look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.

          I was lucky enough to get to do that often as a kid. I grew up in Phitsanulok, a small city up north of Thailand . I remember my parents regularly drove me off the city at night in the weekend..to the countryside far away from light pollution. We did sat outside (just like Calvin said) looking up to twinkle stars. Astronomy was one of my first favorite subjects so I was a little tour guide for a family outing like this. I could describe all constellations up there...and not only their names..but also how far they are in light years.. how big ..how hot these different starts are ..and whether they would quietly die out as white dwarfs or explode as supernova in the next so-and-so billion years.
          Like what Calvin said, learning about and looking into the vast universe makes us (well, at least me) humble and also feel detached from all other "trivial things" in regular human life. I think this the most amazing aspect of science..but also the most disturbing part of it. We, human beings, are to some extent megalomanic by nature. We like to think that we are very important..we are at the center of the whole universe which was somehow created..just for us... by some loving supreme being up there. Again and again throughout history, science told us that such intuition was dead wrong. Science told us that we were merely product of mindless evolution...we are just little creatures..living on a little planet..which is one of many planets around the sun...which is just a star...one of many many other stars within a galaxy..one of many many galaxies.. well...length of our lives is just a blink of an eye compared to the age of the universe.. and the size of our impact..no matter how hard we work..is like a tiny grain of sand in the cosmic ocean.
...That's really disturbing.. even for those who're in love with science like me.
 10.50 pm 25 Oct 2012, Palo Alto CA USA