re: #104 pingjockey

What really pisses me off is the arrogance of those DI folks. We have a universe of wonder out there. It is the height of hubris(I think) to think that this one little ball of water and rock is the only place where there is life. They are short changing the capability of the Supreme Being.

Err… I hope this quote isn’t too big… but it is magnificent:
ejectejecteject.com

I object to these things not because they are silly, but because they are lazy. They are just, in the final analysis, so incredibly boring, mundane and unimaginative, compared to the real wonders, the authentic magic. Look! A Leprechaun! It’s like a man! Only smaller than most men you normally see!

We ooh and ahh at some circles stamped out in a wheat field, but completely ignore pillars of gas and dust so beautiful and so enormous that if you drove fast enough to cross the US in a second, your great�grandchildren would grow old before they reached the end of it. We, a species that can make things from individual atoms, who can decode the history of every living thing on earth, draw maps of the world of a billion years ago, take pictures of the far side of Neptune�s moons, puzzle out virtual particles in a bubbling quantum soup, look into space and time back to the first .0000000000000001 second of the Big Bang and who can conceive of and live their lives by concepts such as honor and justice and freedom, can find enough REAL magic, enough authentic, verifiable wonders to keep us busy for as long as we live. Yet this species stands in line to buy books about a face on Mars and how to keep razor blades sharp by storing them in a pyramid made from popsicle sticks.

We are failing our children if we let a two-dollar piece of particle board obscure the view of the redwood forest just beyond it. Give me half an hour in an observatory with anyone and I will introduce them to wonders they will think about for the rest of their lives.

They are more challenging than flying saucers, sea serpents, or wee people with their pots of gold. To understand them enough to be floored by their magnificence requires a little patience, a little imagination. It does, in fact, require some work.

But these wonders have one powerful advantage. They have the advantage of being real.