It’s fun to play with, and kids will instantly understand how days and nights, seasons, eclipses, and prophecies are produced. “Oh, so that’s how you Revelations 6:12 it!”
But for real vertigo, nausea, set the scale to “True” and zoom out, out, out. For an instant (or longer depending on what you’re drinking/smoking/popping), it shakes your narcissism.
The famous video about The Size Of The Universe isn’t as good, in my opinion, at producing this vertigo, because it is narrated by a human– now matter how far out we go, it still puts us at the “center.” That perspective balances the proportions, and, as the Guide says, if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
Note that in the comments of that video, the conversation turns immediately to religion– not to interstellar travel, or the possibility of alien life, or even to the impossibility of receiving information past certain distances– God. We want out of this conversation and “us” back to the center, which is what invoking God does. I’m not saying religion is “wrong,” just noting how quickly we abandon “science” in favor or “philosophy” when the questions and the distances and the time get too big. I hope that programs like this, shown to kids early enough, will extend that limit before their brain reflexively pulls a Spinoza; and maybe that perspective keeps them interested in creating things bigger than themselves.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
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