How does this video make you feel? Insignificant? Amazed? Hopeful? Helpless? And why?

Not to sound like a know-it-all, but I already realized I was an insignificant spec on top of a pale blue dot in a tiny pinprick of a solar system. Just means there’s A lot to discover out there. I guess that counts as hopeful?

Now, i know what one grain of sand feels like in the ocean.

it made me cry.
and I think I’ll have a “depression” until tomorrow morning.
Why?
Maybe because I know that I’m not even a point in all that and our planet is hardly a point.
So while I’m struggling with my miserable life the universe goes as I don’t exist.
Wait I think that my “depression“just extended until tomorrow morning.
Perhaps I should stop before I explode.

I love that video. I’ve seen similar ones a few times. It makes me feel as though the things I worry about are insignificant and the fears I have are meaningless in the face of something like The Pillars of Creation. Life is short. It’s OK.

And think of how many of those star clusters are themselves already gone! We’re just seeing the reflected light from them from millions of years ago.

It makes me feel hopeful, because it makes me remember there’s so much more to the solar system than our Earth. We can impact our own planet (and honestly even if we push ourselves into an ice age with our impact we won’t kill all life, and the Earth will rebound and life will flourish here again), but we can’t destroy the whole galaxy, let alone the universe.

It also makes me think about how outdated our knowledge of the far reaches of the universe are. If they’re billions of light-years away, our knowledge is billions of years old, because we can’t “read” the information till it gets to us! (Whoops, @aprilsimnel got there just before me! So cool though.)

as a amateur astronomer i see first hand just how insignificant we all are every time i stare through the eyepiece.

And i wonder why i can’t find a job…amazing video, love it, already felt small insignificant

I feel alive seeing this video. Just to be here to see it, to take in the scope that the video conveys is… kinda quieting. The energy of light, of gravity, of radio waves, of being alive at this moment; I feel like I’m contributing to it all in some small way – like the tiniest gear of a magnificent chronograph.

Thanks for that link, @75movies! I was lost after the radio signals graphic. I like videos like that.

To answer my own question – I am continually inspired by these types of videos and from those who attempt to share their knowledge with laymen (Sagan, Tyson, etc.). Not long ago we were learning to use fire and now we have an incredible amount of knowledge about the physical world. And we are still only just barely scratching the surface of the surface of the surface. It’s amazing. As far as significance goes I have never thought of humans as insignificant rather I think of us a piece of a system that is the other side of the equal sign. Without us, at least in this moment, there is no universe.

I don’t think I can bring myself to watch a video that could potentially make me feel any smaller than I do already

Cogito, ergo sum. Thus I think I can still claim some right to being just a bit special in this universe, no matter how big it is.

Wonderful video, @75movies! Thanks!

It made me feel like I really wish I had the understanding to go much, much further than just 3:33, (our cosmic horizon in space and time.) That was a fantastic video.

I like being taken out of my own perspective, I welcome the little bit of fear and loss of control in trying to imagine what the shape and extent of space is. Great video.

While I appreciate the inescapable perspective such a video gives us all, it makes me appreciate my life here on Earth, the education I was able to obtain, the opportunities I have had and still have to teach, and the community of other inquiring minds here on link (flurther).
Our importance and knowledge is finite, our opportunities to learn, infinite.
That is pretty amazing!

I just have to post some Carl Sagan wisdom now. XD

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.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe:, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

(...)

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

As for my own thoughts: I don’t think our smallness means we’re “insignificant”, because significance requires a subjective judge to decide what is and what is not important. We’re the only beings in the known universe who could judge this. And to us, there is nothing in the universe that is more important than each other.

As an afterthought to the religious jellies here: look at that video and then consider the notion that all of that was created just so that we can exist.

Here’s another thought I jotted down a while ago.

I know the universe is immense beyond all imagination, and our existence seems so infinitesimal even compared to just our own solar system.
But also think about this.
The matter that makes up your body is much older than you. It was once part of a star, before this solar system formed. And that was its boring period.
It was a gaseous substance then, dispersed over a huge mass of the exact same gaseous substance. More of the same old stuff in an immeasurable ocean of boring homogeneity.
But look at it now. It’s become a human body. One of the most complex and fascinating things in the known universe. And what’s more, it’s self-aware, able to think and reason and imagine and dream. It’s become a sentient life form. And that is the most amazing thing it could ever become.
Your short-lived existence is the pinnacle of your body matter.

I can’t believed i haven’t seen this in the 3 years since it’s been posted!
This video is amazing. However, I think this should be the sound track!