actually I don't care. I don't have to be the star of the show, I just want to be happy and I'm hot enough to be my own star (or sun to be specific).

The sun is actually pretty small. Do a comparison between the sun and some of the bigger stars, then we'll see just how insignificant we really are.

Ack ack ======🔫

Years ago I was on 2C-B and lounging about in my brother's room, staring at a big glowing plastic moon I had bought for him as a joke, when somehow the word and concept of it sent me spiraling down a rabbit hole of cosmic realization. At first the moon (or perhaps my thoughts surrounding the moon) began to rotate like a planetary body, becoming a parent star in a galactic arm, and eventually the central mass of a galaxy itself, ever turning with long tendril arms orbiting around its perimeter.

As the question of it grew, it became the universe itself, on a profoundly metaphysical level, and I came to the realization that every single living organism, both here and elsewhere in the cosmos, are not so much a part or some greater plan or design, but are instead just individual cells and appendages of recently awakened universe. One that has blinked its eyes from a deep sleep and has slowly become self-aware. And just as a child born blind will at some point use their hands and discover they have a body for the first time, we are tiny (but not insignificant) appendages of that universe discovering and exploring itself, trying to make sense or what it even is.

I found immense comfort in the idea that there is no greater meaning to everything than that. We're just a part of something bigger that is at this very moment trying to make sense of itself, and I don't need more than that.

Some little pebble thought too much of itself.

bigger than I thought, tbh.

Wrong. The arrow points to Mars, not to Earth.

Let me introduce you to UY Scuti.

Reported for doxing

“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 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. 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.

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.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

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.”

― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Edit: As I took another look at the comments and the picture, the picture points to Mars. I confess I commented because of assumptions that "know your place" and the arrow points to our pale blue dot, Earth. Guilty as charged in reading the headline and not the content. The Omnissiah is not amused at the weakness of my flesh.

Joke’s on you, I’m zaphod beeblebrox

On Mars? TIL

Here's the galaxy and our approximate location in this system. To give you an idea of scale .... the galaxy is estimated to be about 100,000 light years across. Meaning that if you could travel at the speed of light (which is impossible), it would still take you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy from edge to edge.

It's all relative though. Yes, we're insignificant to the rest of the universe, but...

LONG LIVE MCR!

I sure love living in a burning planet where I have to pay taxes to pedophiles who want to send me to a concentration camp.

I'm insignificant?

Oh, thank God