Have you ever thought, “Where the hell are we?” I don’t mean like when you are lost on a road trip, I mean, where the heck is Earth? Where, exactly, is this planet of ours within the wider world? We are in a solar system, a galaxy… the universe — THE UNIVERSE! What is that? How big is it? Where does it go? Where is it? These are questions I’m sure many of us have asked during those times when we ponder our existence or the meaning of life, and even when we care so much about that little piece of our hair that isn’t quite sticking in the right spot.
But that’s the point of what I’m about to show you. We take life REALLY seriously sometimes. We transform the smallest things into biggest things in the world, all in our own minds, and inflict so much anxiety and suffering on ourselves as a result. As a society in general we take life incredibly seriously here, working the 9-5 grind in jobs we don’t like, performing repetitive actions with very little meaning or purpose, all so we can earn a paycheque (so we can buy food, so we can keep on living, so we can keep earning to make sure we keep living). It’s an endless cycle. Does that sound right? Does that sound like what we are here for and are destined to do until the end of time… if that ever comes?
I say no. I say it’s not what we are here to do and I think you know that, too. I know you have that feeling inside you, just like I do, that knows there’s more to this life, to this world, to our existence. As Morpheus said in The Matrix, “You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Fiction or not, he hits the nail right on the head. You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about these things. That you haven’t wondered why we do what we do and whether or not things will one day change. Look around, people seem to be walking around like robots these days, just trying to figure out what’s next. We don’t even know why we do many of the things we do anymore and THAT’S GREAT! That means we are starting to look for purpose and meaning. We are evolving consciously and it’s starting to reflect in our external world, which is causing us to question, to do new things, and to change the way we live. After all, it’s why I made this film a couple years ago… something is happening in our world. People are waking up.
01: Earth: We live here, pretty simple… but let’s go deeper.
02: This is where we are in our solar system. Mercury definitely feels the heat.
03: Here is how far we are away from our moon. Not that far, is it?
04: But it is that far! You can fit all the planets in our entire solar system in that gap.
05: North America often thinks it’s the centre of the universe… but here’s how big it is when placed over Jupiter. Humbling?
06: This is what 6 Earths look like beside Saturn.
07: How about what Saturn’s rings would look like if they were around Earth?
08: This is a comet. We landed a probe on one of these not long ago. Here’s what one looks like compared to Los Angeles:
09: But then there is the Sun… which is huge. Look.
10: This is what you look like from our moon:
11: And what you look like from Mars:
12: And what you look like from just behind Saturn’s rings.
13: And here’s you from just beyond Neptune… 4 billion miles away.
Everyone you know is on that little speck…
14: Going a little deeper now, here’s the size of Earth compared with the size of our sun
16: But that’s nothing. Carl Sagan once said, there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth:
19: But none of those compares to the size of a galaxy. Check this one… if you shrank the sun down to the size of a white blood cell and shrunk the Milky Way galaxy down using the same scale, the Milky Way would be the size of the United States:
20: Here’s where you are in that massive galaxy we live in.
21: But this is all we typically see of it..
(Not quite a pic of the Milky Way, but you get the idea.)
(Not quite a pic of the Milky Way, but you get the idea.)
22: And here we go again… our galaxy is a runt compared with some others. Here’s the Milky Way compared to IC 1011, 350 million light years away from Earth:
23: But let’s think bigger. In JUST this picture taken by the Hubble telescope there are thousands and thousands of galaxies, each containing millions of stars, each with their own planets.
24: Here’s one of the galaxies pictured, UDF 423. This galaxy is 10 BILLION light years away. When you look at this picture, you are looking billions of years into the past.
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