Your Life Doesn’t Mean Jack Shit

The Hubble Telescope has revealed new images of nearby (at least cosmically speaking) galaxy NGC 1672. Looking at shit like that always reminds me of a particular quote from our friend Carl Sagan, about seeing the earth, and yourself as it’s inhabitant in the proverbial “big picture”:

” Look again at that dot. That’s here. 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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”