^^ Yeah, I love all things to do with the cosmos and our place in it etc. There's been loads of recent eye candy docs over on Discovery and National Geographic, together with recent BBC offerings. Too many really as I can't remember the specifics of them as they overlap a lot obviously. But I've been trying to locate an animation from one of them that blew me away recently. Very much like the one in 'Everything' where they showed the cosmic web of galaxies visualised from outside the universe. Impossible of course, but a great visual representation of what we are part of. This particular animation showed a whole section of the universe and it's connecting filaments of galaxies tied together with dark energy (or matter, I can't remember which!). The animation had a name, some russian ruler or something, but the one thing that struck me was how it resembled neurons and how they were connected in the brain.
I've always been drawn to the thought that our own galaxy is just a single neuron in a brain and that we are just some quantum particles within it, winking in and out of exhistance just like the quantom world. Crazy stuff I know, and possibly the result of far too many drugs over far too many years. But I love the idea of infinity in and infinity out. So maybe there are countless galaxies within our own brains
Also, I love stats that put things into perspective. You can talk about the universe being 13.7 billion years old, but numbers start to loose meaning at those levels. Especially when you talk of distances and time. Like....how old will the universe be when it finally dies. As in not even any photons left. Turns out that if we were to count all the atoms in our bodies, carry on counting to include the atoms in the planet, then onto the solar system and our own galaxy even. That wouldn't be enough. Even if we counted all the atoms in the entire universe, the number we counted to would still come nowhere near the number needed to show the final age of the universe. That leaves me more shocked than any digit followed by thousands of zeros would.
Then there's this one that I love that shows distances within the universe. Saying that Andromeda is our closest galaxy at 2.5 million light years away makes it sound almost close compared to the 13 billion or so light years distance that we can detect objects and so looses meaning. So to put it into perspective it comes as a shock to learn that since our own galaxy and Andromeda will collide in the future, and we getting closer by around 6 million miles every day, it will still take 3 billion years until we do so. Wow.
Then there's the fact that most of what we see is simply nothing. 99. something % of each atom is made up of nothing. Food for the brain innit?
Sorry to go on, off to watch some cookery programs now to wind down