[Insert pretentious name here]

Last night while reading "A Short History of Nearly Everything" I realized just how puny and insignificant we, humans, really are compared to the universe. It really is quite a blow to man's ego to think, hey, maybe this is only one of countless universes, that eventually our universe will collapse in on itself and the whole "Big Bang" cycle will start again, erasing all memory that we ever existed. It is interesting just to sit back, and try to imagine the universe. Could you do it? No. You can't. :) The human mind is incapable of even imagining the vastness of our solar system. Did you know that all our little posters that go up in classrooms of our solar system aren't even close to scale? Did you know, that even if you shrink Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system, down to the size of the dot on this "i", and Pluto the size of a molecule, Pluto would still be 35 feet away were a picture drawn to scale? "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is an amazing book. I am hardly 50 pages into it, and already it has motivated me sufficiently to post ;) It is incredibly easy to read, gives lots of numbers, but in a very interesting way. Such as this: Did you know that there are something along the lines of 10 billion trillion planets in our universe? Now imagine this: If you were randomly inserted into our universe, the chances that you would land close to or on a planet is less that one in 10³³. (thats a 1 followed by 33 zeros, in case you aren't familiar with scientific notation)

So with that number specifically, I realized that:

1. We really are quite puny and insignificant, and that no matter how badly George Bush screws up today, there is always next universe.

and 2. "A Short History of Nearly Everything", by "Bill Bryson" is a really good book.