Stargazing

Outside of the town of Big Pine is the Owens Valley Radio Observatory. I'd visited it a few times as a kid, and aside from the badass liquid nitrogen demonstration they have at the end of the tour (dude, they straight up froze a rose and made it shatter like glass! 7-year-old me was like, "THAT'S RAD!") it got me interested in the night sky. The giant radio telescopes they have detect bodies in deep space using radio waves, and the results are images of colorful blobs representing different collections of interstellar gasses and matter in the void of space. It's a heavy concept for a little kid; there's stuff way, way, way out there in space, and the world is really small compared to the grand scheme of the Universe. It's one thing to go to a planetarium and another to stand in the place where scientists look into space daily, and it's one thing to see models and another to see actual images of deep space bodies that we will never be physically able to go to ever. 

For an small town boy in elementary school, realizing you're an insignificant speck on an insignificant speck floating around in an insignificant speck in a cluster of insignificant specks is kind of heavy.

As I got older I got into the habit of wandering into the desert and staring at the night sky. The beautiful thing about growing up in the middle of nowhere is the lack of light pollution and how easy it is to escape it, so when I wanted to do some introspection as a teenager I could walk or drive a short ways and be in complete darkness with nothing but the inky blackness of space with its Milky Way and countless constellations above me. I started thinking about being a particle in the universe made up of smaller parts, which were made up of smaller parts, and so on, and thinking about being made up of particles that were made up of other smaller stuff was enough infinity to keep my geeky high school self stoked on everything. Finding me stargazing and thinking about stuff was a pretty big hobby of mine once upon a time.

I still do the stargazing-and-thinking-about-stuff thing today. Whenever I'm camping, or walking around town at night, or hanging out at an outdoor party in the desert, I usually find myself looking up at the infinite expanse, and the completely unknown volumes space holds. I think about the atoms that make up my physical being like the amazing technicolor dream gasses of radio telescope images. I remind myself that the universe is a pretty big deal, and me being like my own universe makes me kind of a big deal too, and that everyone ever is like the universe and a big deal, and that sort of connection to everyone and everything that comes from stargazing tends to make me feel a lot better about life.

There are two things I can say for sure since I'd visited the OVRO; even though the universe is massive it doesn't mean we're all too insignificant, and that liquid nitrogen is hella cool.