I couldn’t agree more. The images are beautiful, as you absorb what’s being contemplated.

Happy Friday.

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Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson is the CEO of RedLink and RedLink Network, a past-President of SSP, and the founder of the Scholarly Kitchen. He has worked as Publisher at AAAS/Science, CEO/Publisher of JBJS, Inc., a publishing executive at the Massachusetts Medical Society, Publishing Director of the New England Journal of Medicine, and Director of Medical Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics. Opinions on social media or blogs are his own.

Discussion

3 Thoughts on "The Most Astounding Fact About the Universe"

This is wonderful thank you so much for finding it and sharing it Kent. We have a prolix tv celeb here called Brian Cox – this puts him to shame as it sums up the whole thing in under four minutes. Bertrand Russell said if you can out it in a nutshell it’s not worth saying. On this occasion he’s proved wrong.

Some of the photos of star formation systems from the Hubble telescope that appear in this clip also hang on the walls of the National Aeronautic and Space museum in Washington. Next door, in the American Indian Museum they illustrate a completing theory of star formation with hand-drawn sketches of people falling out of a tree and turning into stars. I wonder how people tell which theory is correct?

At the other end of the mall in the basement of the Holocaust Museum there is an exhibition that shows the propaganda methods and media that the Nazi’s used to get good people to to do stupid things. The scary thing is that those methods and media are the same as – no, inferior versions of – the methods and media used by the republican party – and the democratic party – and the Heritage Foundation – and Green Peace – and, well, everyone who wants to energize people into doing something. The problem is that you can’t tell from the methods and media whether the message is right or wrong, good or bad, smart or stupid.

The most Depressing Fact about the human world, and the US in particular, is that the overwhelming majority of people can’t tell which theory is correct. They are overwhelmed by the communications – they are the whim of the propagandists.

So the most astounding fact about life in the Universe is that there certainly exists life in millions or billions of places throughout the universe and so there’s a chance that intelligent life might evolve and survive, the phrase of utter stupidity that the human race is going through.

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