This very cool NASA photo is from Bob Behnken's twitter page. (Behnken is one of the two astronauts slated to ride SpaceX's first manned Crew Dragon flight, sometime around April of next year.) The photo was taken from the Cassini spacecraft. The bright star-like object below the rings and towards the right is our blue Earth. (We think that it's pretty big, but it's pretty small in the grand scale of things.)
Earth seen from Saturn |
You are right! In the "grand scheme of things," the planet Earth is but a tiny shimmering dot of reflected starlight (that star being our Sun).
On a universal scale Humans are a mere mote of dust and our brains even less, yet something so minute can attempt to comprehend it. Does that mean the equipment required to understand the entire universe can be contained in a space no larger than a couple of cubic feet (or less)?
(Nov 15, 2019 03:46 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: On a universal scale Humans are a mere mote of dust and our brains even less, yet something so minute can attempt to comprehend it. Does that mean the equipment required to understand the entire universe can be contained in a space no larger than a couple of cubic feet (or less)? General understanding, at least (conceptual representations). Even the vastly incomplete descriptive inventory we have about specific things has to be farmed-out to memories stored outside the head (records). But our phenomenal representations of the environment as objects and sensations in space carries its own built-in implication that such continues to exist like that beyond the limits of what one immediately perceives. And indeed, anywhere you go the events/states of quantum fields will be converted into everyday stuff (although affairs in outer space are an atypical variety of what humans experience). The Brain — is wider than the Sky — For — put them side by side — The one the other will contain With ease — and You — beside — --Emily Dickinson https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...er-the-sky |
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