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There's a quote from a commencement speech by scientist and astronomer Carl Sagan (one of my many idols), just a hair on the outside of 7 months before his death in 1996 wherein he famously referred to the Earth as a "Pale Blue Dot", with a composite photograph taken by the space craft Voyager1 in 1990 from 3.7 billion (with a B!) miles away for context. From time to time I re-read this portion of his speech and every time it evokes some powerful emotion inside me. It still makes me feel tiny; and along with me, it makes my problems, and in a way, my joys, feel tiny too.

Tonight I ran across a youtube video that emulates something similar, but on a much grander scale. I dare not embed it here, because the size and quality wouldn't do it justice. Go watch the video here: The Known Universe by AMNH.

The first difference is that this is a simulation, of course. By the time we could send a video camera that far out (or close to it — I guess you probably can't send a video camera outside the known boundaries of space and time) and back, our world could have been created and lived out its entire existence several times over.

But the other thing that struck me was just how much more there is than I was even considering in the context of Sagan's remarks. So yeah, we're a bunch of mites on "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." But even that seems big when you think that the sunbeam in question is a tiny fraction of our galaxy — more than 100,000 light-years across, which is a tiny fraction of our universe — about a million light-years across, which is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of current known limitations of space and time (which I don't claim to even begin to understand!) — more than 13 billion light years away from us.

Ok, ok, 13 billion light years away from us is a long, long time. How long, really, though? That means that light we see coming from the farthest edges of space and time started its journey more than 13 billion "years" ago. I quoted "years" because in this scale, it seems silly to me to use a unit of measure somewhat arbitrarily defined by us dust-mote-dwellers.

So there you go. Happy Friday. You're tiny. Maybe your problems don't seem so significant now, eh?