More cosmic philosophy

The dearth of optimistic visions of the future, at least in the United States, is central to the psychic atmosphere of this bleak era. Pessimism is everywhere... https://t.co/DmP0kCzyas via @NYTOpinion

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) January 26, 2020

	TPM Philosophy Quote (@tpmquote)
1/25/20, 6:00 PM Every instant of time is a pinprick of eternity. All things are petty, easily changed, vanishing away.--Marcus Aurelius

“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.”

Carl Sagan's timeless cosmic serenade to Earth, animated: https://t.co/7pSbndYSOB

— Maria Popova (@brainpicker) January 26, 2020 

"When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty."

Gorgeous: https://t.co/LEvCkECyAj

— Maria Popova (@brainpicker) January 26, 2020

Too small

“We have a theology that is Earth-centered and involves a tiny piece of space, and when we step back, when we attain a broader cosmic perspective, some of it seems very small in scale. And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe...

Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small...

A new concept of god: “something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled god. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature…that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow…Mars…the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quarters known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us...

The number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way is at least in the thousands of millions and perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of millions, each of which contains a number of stars more or less comparable to that in our own galaxy... And this vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion..."

― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

 Klein sees in a single rose the sublime interdependence of all life; a day of stormy weather points to the world’s unpredictability; a marble conjures the birth of the cosmos. As he contemplates the deepest mysteries—the nature of reality, dark matter, humanity’s place among the galaxies, and more—Klein encourages us to fall in love with the universe the way scientists do: with a grasp of the key ideas and theories of twenty-first-century physics that bring to life the wonders of, really, everything... g'r

"Over two millennia, the air Julius Caesar exhaled at the moment of his death has spread evenly over the whole Earth..." So, every liter of air including the one you just ingested contains one of those molecules.

See Sam Kean, Caesar's Last Breath





The antidote to cosmic despair:



"Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things." Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian