Staring at that Hubble deep field photo for 20 minutes hit me different last night

I read a comment from an astronomer saying each speck of light is billions of years old and billions of galaxies away, and it made me realize how small my traffic jam this morning really was - anyone else feel kind of peaceful after looking at those old deep space images?

3 comments

3 Comments

patricialee2mo agoTop Commenter

Doesn't it just put everything in its place though? I looked at the same photo a few nights ago and felt like I could finally breathe. Those little specks are whole galaxies with billions of stars and maybe even other people looking right back at us. Next time you're stuck in traffic, just picture yourself as one tiny dot on one tiny planet circling one tiny sun. It makes the honking and the waiting seem pretty silly, but in a good way.

derek_schmidt62mo ago

My buddy Mike had a panic attack on the 405 last year during rush hour. He pulled over, looked up at the sky through his sunroof, and saw a single bright dot he later learned was Jupiter. He told me he just sat there for ten minutes thinking about how that planet has like 95 moons and we can barely keep track of our own parking spaces. Now when he gets stuck in traffic he starts naming constellations instead of swearing at the car in front of him. It sounds hippie-ish but the guy hasn't had a speeding ticket since.

the_jenny21d ago

That specific detail about Jupiter's 95 moons from derek_schmidt6 and what @patricialee said about breathing easier really got me thinking. I looked up last night after reading this and found Jupiter in the southern sky, clear as anything even with all the city lights. It's nuts that just that one little bright dot has almost a hundred moons orbiting it, and we're sitting here worrying about which exit to take. I mean, imagine being one of those moons just silently circling for billions of years while we panic about a dent in our car door. Patricia is right that zooming out like that makes everything feel smaller and more manageable at the same time. It's like giving your brain permission to stop caring about small stuff for a minute.