Saturday, March 31, 2007

After remembering a nearly year-old book recommendation last time I was at the library, I'm now in the middle of Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead" (sequel to "Ender's Game," which was the remembered recommendation). It's got a bit of a different flow to it than "Ender's," but I read a line I LOVED last night:

... he knew that most stars were invisible to us; a trillion of them could disappear and we'd not know it. For thousands of years we would continue to see the photons that had already been launched before the star disappeared. By the time we could see the galaxy go blank, it would be far too late to amend our course. (pp. 87)

I can't even properly verbalize the reasons why this struck me, though the nagging thing I want to say is that it really puts the insignificance of the individual - and even society - in perspective. That was a favorite concept from my astronomy class at UNC: in universal terms, none of this matters. The whole of human existence only dates back about 200,000 years. The universe is, conservatively, 13 BILLION. So, human history is 1/70,000 (1.42 percent) of history as we can establish it. Crazy stuff, this.

Labels: Life the Universe and Everything, Orson Scott Card