A Series of Humbling Pictures

Chosen Excludee!

Thanks. There are galactic mergers out there a whole lot bigger than our Milky Way and Andromeda http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/1533/massive-galactic-merger-largest-ever-pile

Thank you for that!
How brilliant would it be to see that happening!!! Sped up, of course.

Well all we have to do to watch our own Milky Way's admittedly smaller-scale collision with Andromeda is wait another 5 billion years. Not sure how to speed this up but see you then

You may not consider it humbling that humanity has gone from viewing itself as the center of "creation" to the minutest speck imagineable, but I do.

Hi Edgar!

No I don't, I've always been aware of the immensity of this universe. It is nice to see the local differences though. Now you have to add the atom to the equation - That's even farther away, but right in our grasp.

Great pics though!

Kind regards Edgar!
Mark...

You can nit pick any idea into meaninglessness. Have fun.

Any physicists around may wish to correct this but counting orders of magnitude our size (meaning to include all living creatures on the planet in this order of magnitude) does fall about halfway between the great galactic clusters and the tiniest of subatomic particles.

I repeat thanks to Edgar Blythe who started this thread.

Maybe the sense of humiliation at the sheer overwhelming magic of the cosmos only occurs to those whose brain was afflicted with the megalomania implicit in the tag line about
"....a sphinx of cement and aluminum
Bashed open their skulls
And ate up their brains and imaginations?"
The poet got over heroin addiction. Anyone else who managed to achieve the same can and maybe should feel humbled. Anyone got over religious mania ditto. But there's no reason for the rest of us to feel humiliation, for what? I'm amazed anyone sane would be objecting to standing in awe of the COSMOS, from the largest star cluster to probability waves of such tiny dimensions no instrument we could ever invent could ever observe them.

Every single subatomic particle in our bodies whether we're chimps or whales or amoebas was once part of a star. Once we're gone it will eventually return to another star, anthropic principle notwithstanding. If that's not enough to be thankful and rejoice at this sense of wonder then I'm sorry for whoever feels "humbled". If he wants to check out of the universe I'm not stopping him, the planet is groaning with overpopulation by uninformed humans as it is.

http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/what-recovery/151413-humility-vs-humiliation.html

So wasn't it YOU who wrote this headline, "...HUMBLING pictures"? How is this reaction to the marvels of the universe explained by whatever humility or humiliation might be acquired or experienced in any detox place? You're digging your own grave, nobody's stopping you, just don't expect others to join voluntarily. I think you're confused. At best. None of this is to be construed as detracting from your wonderful thread topic. I just don't understand how you think it knowledge of the universe might be "humbling" for any living creature. All of us, however little we contributed to this glory, can feel uplifted by seeing it. I'm sorry if you don't understand this.

Psst Edgar!

You havin fun yet?

You are an arrogant son of a gun. You don't understant what I have written. Or are too impressed with yourself to see there is more to it than you will concede. You remind me of my dog, who saw a black sheet of plastic in the yard and spent three hours barking at it. You have education, but it's doing you no good. Screw off.

That's true, at least. And I've written twice now asking you politely for an explanation. At your convenience. If an explanation isn't forthcoming, fine, your original pictures were of great interest to me by themselves. No need to insult posters who take the time to write to thank you and compliment you.

I found lots of simulations of colliding galaxies on the Hubble website. This is a picture from NASA's deep field view of our own galactic center. A giant black hole sits right in the center. Maybe that's the black hole feeding the massive negativity on this thread At least some posters in addition to you and me will probably be interested

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/galaxy/pr2009028b/web_print/npp/all/titles/true/

helen, is that you?

what a friendly demeanor you have, kind sir...

I saw this on video last week. This is the infrared shot isn't it?

Fantastic picture - Wouldn't mind recreating this on my bedroom ceiling. Thank you!

P.s ... Any good at painting ceilings?

I don't know if it's infrared or not but I just found the site for the wallpaper download, the commentary is on the links somewhere http://hubblesite.org/gallery/wallpaper/

Is this your way of saying you don't paint ceilings?

I've never painted anything. But I found you a whole bunch of folks on A2K discussing painting ceilings http://able2know.org/topic/141407-2#post-3905800 sorry for digression everybody

Evolution is no longer the survivalist, darwinian entity it once was.
The weak, sick, and slow often survive.
Perhpas humans have reached the point where a new kind of progress as a species will occur, as evolution seems to be an old thing whose definition applies to our future less and less.

Social darwinism is of course at play a lot, but that's different entirely.