atlas of the universe

Here’s a good ATLAS OF THE UNIVERSE resource (though I can no longer find the one I formerly used that I liked perhaps even better).

It is rare that even the most educated person has a good sense of where we are “geographically” compared with other astronomical bodies. Every literate person knows the planets, and maybe the names of one or two dozen stars, but it all seems so distantly unattainable that we’re under no pressure to know the relative distance from earth of various stars: as if we were unable to distinguish the relative distances of England, Senegal, and China from the American coast.

A few years ago I read a piece by one physicist arguing that the end of subatomic physics may be in sight: that we may actually be close to having a complete model of everything that exists at that level. In response to those who pointed to the infinite advances and surprises of physics, this author observed that some fields of knowledge do become complete, and their mysteries exhausted. His best example was the exploration of the Earth, which used to be filled with perils and surprises, but is now more or less complete, except for occasional discoveries of Tibetan valleys and small patches of Amazon.

However, this example collapses as soon as you move beyond terrestrial geography, which is less than a speck of dust compared to the remainder of the Atlas of the Universe.

I find these sorts of things to be great philosophy stimuli, the reason being that philosophy is less about nailing correct arguments than about expanding the comprehensiveness of your vision by degrees. There is no better way to do that then by moving increasingly further away from the earth in your mind’s eye. Though there is also a terrestrial way to do it, and that is to go back through chains of ancestral creatures and varying geological eras to the dawn of the earth itself.