Myspace? Nah, just regular space

I love space. I love the universe. If I wasn't so bad at math, I'd absolutely be an astronomer, or an astrophysicist or a cosmologist. I love to just sit outside at night and look at all the stars. It kinda makes me feel sick to think about how enormous the universe is. Is is infinite or finite? If it is finite, what happens when you get to the "end"? Does it just stop? If it's infinite, how can that be? Does it change? There is absolutely without a doubt that there is life -initelligent life for that matter- throughout the universe. The earth's size and place in our galaxy is so insignifigant to everything else out there, so there must be lifeforms elsewhere. The earth is so small compared to everything else, we might as well just not exisit at all.

This gif was posted in a Livejournal community that I belong to, make sure you watch the whole thing!:

[I tried to resize it to fit, but photobucket is being lame, so heres the original gif in the LJ post if you want to see it fullsized: CLICK!]




Some people raised some interesting points in their comments in regards to this:

"and, of course, you can shrink that just as small as well. Its all in perspective. Such is the scope of reality."

"Well, I realized that nothing I ever do will ever have any effect on anything."

"Since the Sun's about 4-5 billion years old, that means that best current estimates are that the Sun's halfway through its lifespan now. If we humans make it out of our first 100,000 years or so of our existence to last that many billions of years, we'll have figured out how to go elsewhere by then.And the hugeass stars aren't supernovas. Supernovas are when hugeass stars reach the end of their lives and go BOOM. Novas are when less-than-hugeass stars go BOOM. The Sun isn't big enough to even make a nova; it'll just swell from its current diameter of about 1.4 million km to become a red giant of about 140 million km, and then shrink to become a white dwarf. But even as a red giant, it won't be near as big as those hugeass stars in the animation; picture the red-giant Sun as somewhere between Aldebaran and Betelgeuse." -credit goes to arthur_sc_king

So I guess this raises many questions. I could go on and on about intergalactic phenomena, (black holes,ftw!) but I digress.

Whats the meaning of life? If we are this small, how could we possibly have a purpose in the whole scheme of things? My best guess is that the meaning of life is just to live, however, I am not a very religious person, so I do not believe that everything was created by "god" (although when things like this are so hard to explain, its almost hard to not turn to a god and think that he/she/it created it all.) I feel like life is here on earth is a fluke in some ways, that we just sorta happened, kinda like the universe "just sort of happened," according to the Big Bang Theory.

This also raises more questions. What was around before the Big Bang? What caused the Big Bang to happen? Why did it happen when it did? Did the Big Bang really happen?
It is just a theory afterall.

I can't talk about this anymore, makes me have anxiety haha

-Kaitlyn