All life is sacred. And it’s partly because of its complexity that we’ve seen here on this one planet. But also astronomy has shown us that all life came about through thirteen and a half billion years of tiny miracles of self organization inside stars and nebulae and galaxies. All from light!
there’s a post I just saw where someone is dismissive of astronomy because there’s other sciences that directly deal with human life and the environment, and…what are we made of? Atoms, many born in the centers of stars, thrown through the Universe through supernovae, and we can see this happening!
(anyway watch out for the vinyl record I’m making with my musician wife, “You Were Light,” coming later this year, a recording of a planetarium show on this exact topic)
Yes I know this is hippie/peace and love stuff, and in the modern world that’s seen as “weak” but I don’t really care. Astronomy teaches us to feel special, and a humming, strange, complicated part of everything else around us. The Earth and the Environment are more incredible because of astronomy!
my parents are watching the olympics and there's a spanish ice dancer dressed in an arrakis stillsuit for some reason
first: it doesn't look like his boots were properly fit slip fashion
second: it seems kind of insulting to the proud fremen to freeze precious water just for dancing
I understand why we study Earth and humanity and biology, for similar reasons, but dismissing astronomy because it’s “Far Away Stuff” is a symptom of a much larger type of human ignorance that I worry about along with “my needs are the only ones that matter, why should I care about faraway needs”
last year ESPN dropped the Angels from #1 on their "MLB aggrieved fan index" down to #4 even after listing 8 team nightmares that made them notably worse only because "this chaos is now the norm." Folks,
every year I see people getting excited about MLB Opening Day, which for us fans of the Angels is just the day we get to turn on the Torment Nexus again
Astronomy is a science that *directly* lets us see how complexity and life and the environment came to be! We can take pictures of structures seen only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang! And trace how the Whole Universe has changed! We can see how we were put together, atom by atom!
