[shanelja]

This is without a doubt one of the coolest and most beautiful webgl experiments I have seen in the last few years, it actually struck a real chord with me - music, lighting, effects, the zoom and the sheer beauty of it.

For those people unlucky enough to not be able to load this app (it took me quite a while) here is a particularly fantastic image I took (without asking or any right to, of course) - http://shanearmstrong.co.uk/content/cdn/the_beauty_of_the_co... - I apologize for any slow load times.

[altrego99]

I am guessing you have liked this too - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U

Being a video it is not interactive, but definitely does strike something in me. It's almost the Total Perspective Vortex.

[shanelja]

Until now I had not seen this video, but thank you.

This really puts in to perspective the brevity of human life and how little we have achieved so far, from leaving the primordial soup to firing Glee across our television network to entertain teenage girls and travelling to and from the moon.

We are irrelevantly small and unimportant and yet we have already done the hardest thing, of what we know for sure, there are 8.5 million species on the planet and we are the only constructively intelligent one present here, there are 400 known satellites in our solar system, if you assume that every solar system in the milky way has a similar amount of planetoids on which some minor form of life could have grown, placed around 300 billion stars. I'm going to take a complete guess that only 1 in 10,000 of those contain a similar amount of life, which could be light years off, or could be spot on, or could even be far, far less tan the actual number - we simply don't know yet.

The maths is breathtakingly overwhelming:

(1 / ((8500000 * 400) * 300000000000)) * 10000 = 0.000000000000000098

Our significance in the Milky Way is 0.000000000000000098.

We account for only 0.0000000000000098% of potential life in this galaxy.

But we survived. We made it this far. From here the only way is up, or down, or left or under (depending on the location of the camera when we finally make it far enough off this rock to consider it interstellar travel.)

Disclaimer: This maths was about as well as I could do at 5.30am and is the product of a Google search of the accumulated human knowledge of the last few thousand years

[nathan_long]

>> We are irrelevantly small and unimportant

That we are relatively small is undeniable. That we are unimportant is an emotional judgement that I think is unwarranted. Size != importance.

Importance is a value judgement made in a mind. My left thumb is more important to me than Alpha Centauri is. As far as I know, Alpha Centauri has no opinion on the matter.

Are we important to one another? To yet-unknown sentient creatures? To God?

The answers to those questions will probably not depend on whether we are 1 meter or 1 parsec tall.

[platonichvn]

I agree this is a fantastic demonstration of technology and art.