Spaced Out Sunday

Today is Sunday. I am taking a day off from politics, religion, and war. While the state of the world is very important to me, there are other things that interest me as well, and I would like to take the time, occasionally, to add them to this blog.

Today I am going to post two short videos that are of particular interest to me. It is hard to explain my fascination with the cosmos. Perhaps it all began with John Glenn orbiting the planet when I was in the third grade and the whole school was listening to the radio over the loudspeakers and praying for his safe return. Then there was JFK talking about the "New Frontier", quickly followed by satellite launches and moon landings.

Television brought space, the final frontier, into our homes, our hearts, and our imaginations. Science fiction, a favourite genre of mine since childhood, had evolved from the impossible to the possible, from fiction to fact. The great writers of this genre have paved the way for our generation to imagine, and achieve the scientific breakthroughs that define, in the most positive way, our potential as human beings.

Today science is working to answer all the question that the Universe presents us with. From the sub-atomic to the truly cosmic, all barriers are being broken. We have been allowed, through science, to gaze at the wonder of it all. We have been allowed, through science, to place ourselves into cosmic proportion, and to appreciate not only our own insignificance in the Universe, but our own extreme importance.

I am not a religious person, as some of you might have guessed, but there is something of the "miracle" about humanity. We have the capacity to look at the Universe, measure it, understand it's workings, and perhaps, one day, to traverse it's great expanse. We have it in us to cast off the lines that moor us to this small, beautiful, and troubled planet and explore the galaxies.

So I will let Politics, Religion, and War off the hook for today and post two very interesting and inspiring videos.

The Hubble Deep Field: The most important image ever taken




Mapping the Universe: Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS 2)