An eclipse and the world didn't end yet.
One of the trillions of crappy eclipse photos shot by a cell phone.

An eclipse and the world didn't end yet.

I got to see a full eclipse of the sun yesterday.

And yes, it was fascinating. It was a very visceral reminder of our tiny human experience in the middle of great, physical machinations.

I was lucky. I lived right in the middle of the totality path and just wandered to a nearby lakefront park with a lot of friends and watched our little solar system do one of its magic tricks.

It got dark. The lake and the hills and trees and rolling green fields got dark. It never got totally midnight dark, but maybe 7:45 PM dark. It stayed dark for a few minutes and then creeped back to light. It’d been cloudy most of the morning and the totality part came through a big hole in the clouds and we all got to oohhh and aaahhhh. 

There weren’t any human sacrifices or people getting raptured or earthquakes or anything really fun, but it was a unique experience and probably the only time I’ll see it.

But I got to thinking about what William Shatner wrote about going into space on one of the rich guy rockets. He was expecting to be filled with the excitement and joy of space exploration, since he’s made a damned fine living bringing the idea to life.

But instead, it depressed the hell out him.

Big bursts of reality are mostly depressing.

He sat in the rocket, out in cold, dark space, and realized everything around him was empty and dead. He looked down on our beautiful little gem of a planet, all green and blue and cloudy and wet and dry and hot and cold and just full of life and unfortunately full of idiots who are brazenly destroying it all.

And we are destroying it all. I say that without passing judgment or pointing fingers, but yes, we’re screwing the pooch here. Maybe it’s just inevitable. We’re basically yeast, eating up all that sweet grape juice and yakking out ethyl alcohol till our waste kills us.

Yeah, there are rich powers who are getting richer by yakking out more ethyl alcohol and laughing while the poor masses drown in their rich guy waste, but nobody has the huevos to do anything about it.

Sounds kinda nihilistic I suppose.

So that’s where my mind went as the sun disappeared behind the moon for a few moments. Something the universe around us does on a regular basis that means nothing to it but a lot to all of us little yeast cells, and we make a big deal out of the wonders of the grand machinations and blather in awe and do everything possible to destroy our little lifeboat in the process.

“He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.”

And I’ll add my own deep well of thought.

“Whatever. Enjoy what you can because you’re just taking up a little space for a little while, so don’t think it really matters.”

But go find things that make you happy and enjoy the big machinations and maybe we’ll get lucky enough that we won’t destroy it all. There’s hope I suspect.

Amen.

#eclipse #totaleclipse #startrek #norapturedamn

Don Harvey

Musician I Real Estate Agent I Cofounder at SIMS Foundation

7mo

Excellent piece of writing Chris.

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Interesting and insightful perspective.   I was listening to a podcast called One Year: 1977 recently. They were talking about how a satellite pointed towards space called Big Ear got the one blip of a signal in 1977. It is unsure what any of it means, but it could mean other life in space that had a communication signal. They interviewed one scientist who said there is likely life someplace because of how many planets there are. Then, she said something I found very strange. She said that if there is other life, it's most likely much more advanced than us. I thought about how this planet had dinosaur life for almost 200 million years....Why wouldn't another planet have life that is just like animals with nothing that creates technology? It also got me thinking about how some plants and animals around today were also around back then. It's all more vast than I can comprehend.

George Krahn

"Premier Choice for crowdsourced en-route delivery technology"

8mo

Interesting, waiting for NASA to release photos of the eclipse...

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Good stuff, Greta. Important perspective.

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