The BIGGEST Picture

Forgive me for using the term, but this is "mind-blowing" in the purest sense. From TED Talks: "At Serious Play 2008, astrophysicist George Smoot shows stunning new images from deep-space surveys, and prods us to ponder how the cosmos -- with its giant webs of dark matter and mysterious gaping voids -- got built this way."

This talk presents astonishing concepts and imagery. For example, according to Dr. Smoot, there are an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Now, wrapping your brain around the concept of a number as large as a 100 billion is by no means an intuitive process, much less such a figure representing objects as vast as galaxies. By way of comparison, Dr. Smoot estimates that our galaxy alone has about 100 billion stars.

So how does this relate to you? Well, in conjunction with geologic time it represents part of the body of facts that reinforces the idea that you are basically nothing, but then, 100 billion galaxies is also presumably nothing relative to something proportionally larger, so don't feel bad!

Anyway, watch! It's fascinating.