I love stories like this. A subtle reminder how inconsequential our actions are on this planet in the grand, unplanned scheme. I look forward to reading HN with my breakfast each morning then going to a job that helps me raise a family and have fun on the weekends. I read stories of war, corruption, sadistic leaders, and great suffering. I've learned to appreciate the joys of life and have come to terms that we are not here for a long time - just for a good time.

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."

-Bill Watterson

Things can be meaningless on a cosmic timescale and still matter a great deal on a human one. Most of us will never influence the universe, but we'll influence our families, friends, coworkers and even future generations, that's enough...

Just don’t think about all the suffering you or I could ease with the money we spend on a “good time.”

We’re not the good guys. We rationalize the inescapable selfishness placed there by ages of evolution.

The star is also pretty insignificant compared to the whole universe to be honest. Almost everything is at that scale.

And I mean okay, alien intelligence life must be very smart and not contact us because we are so evil and petty and self involved etc. And every single living species we encounter is also the same. Why are we grandstanding these aliens? They are likley sipping coffee in their corner of universe and wondering man why do we keep doing all this nonsense when we are so insignificant etc. That is far more likely to me than aliens who know we exist but willingly stay away because we are humans.

One of the first gravitational wave detections by LIGO was I think the merger of two black holes or maybe a black hole and a neutron star. It was over a billion light years away I think but was so energetic that it conveted approximately 5 Solar masses into energy in about one second. That's ~10^48 Joules. In 1 second that is ~10^48 Watts.

For comparison, the Milky Way has an estimate of 5x10^36 Watts so we're talking about the energy output, very briefly, of roughly a trillion Milky Way galaxies.

The other that gets me is amgnetars. These are neutron stars with an insane magnetic field. The strongest detected exceeds 1 billion Tesla, making is 30 trillion times stronger than Earth's magnetic field. Get too close and it would flatten atoms and ultimately break molecular bonds and rip electrons out of your body. Google seems to think that happens at ~1000km, which is pretty close to get to a neutron star but still, that's a magnetic field.

These things are quite rare and quite unstable. If you think about it, they must have a lot of protons to generate a field so strong, which means that the gravity is overcoming the strong nuclear force but also the electric repulsion.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

> A subtle reminder how inconsequential our actions are on this planet in the grand, unplanned scheme.

I don't like that our culture has developed statements like this.

Every single action you make on planet Earth is more consequential and impactful than the countless parsecs of worthless unobtainable space dust that astrophysicists and science promoters like to glaze over.

Space is nothing compared to the unfathomable amount of synaptic connections in your brain, or the impact you can have on someone's life by hugging them.

Let's piss away all the small blue dot sentiments. They're old and pointless.

There is a pretty significant chance that ours will be a starfaring civilization and that our children will reshape the very heavens.