https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2thegu ... x/t/114333stevensfo wrote:Well, the closest star to us is Proxima Centauri, only 4.3 light years away. You have to put it in context. When we're young, one mile is a long way.pje16 wrote: One light year is 5.88 trillion miles
My head hurts thinking about that distance and just small and insignificant we are
On a bike, much closer. By car, 10 miles is close. By plane....etc. One day, we may have devices capable of bending space/time for a split second, but enough to get us across vast distances.
and just small and insignificant we are
Miss a few mortgage or credit card payments! You soon discover how important you are!
Steve
The Total Perspective Vortex is the most savage psychic torture a sentient being can undergo.
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You are here"
The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation – every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her.
Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she haw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion.