An excessive number of stars

[jhetley]

I have this weird habit -- if the weather isn't actively fatal outside, I like to go out and stare at the night sky before heading upstairs to the final email/internet session and bed. Well, temps around 10 F aren't _immediately_ dangerous, so I did my routine, crunching around on the pitiful remnants of snow in the backyard, scaring the neighborhood skunks and staring up. Cold clear air is good for "seeing."

You know, there are a _lot_ of stars out there? Even with city lights around? I find it rather comforting, actually. We can fuck this place up and not affect any of the rest of the universe at all.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, from a nice dark place you can see a couple thousand of them. With HST we can see over ten million just in our galaxy. There are about 100 billion total in our galaxy, and it's just one of many billions of galaxies.

But the really amazing thing to me is that in us the universe has gained self-awareness. We don't know for sure if there's any other sky watching intelligence in the universe, but we know we are.