Crushing your head... crush crush

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."

— Neil Armstrong

After a long day at the office, and a busy few weeks, I went out for my monthly Skeptics in the Pub. A fine evening of odd, interesting and fun banter, with people of the same characteristics. I was introduced to a game called "Marry, Shag, Kill", in which one participant proposes 3 people to whom another participant has to assign one of each of those verbs. A fascinating game with many and fine permutations. The more one has imbibed, the finer the game seems, it seems.

Perhaps the most memorable event of the evening, though, occurred on the ride home. A few minutes of relative solitude on the bus provided me with the chance to think. Disdaining such activity for the waste of time it is, I chose instead to distract myself with that odd, moon-like object hanging in the sky.

Which, it turns out, was the moon.

Now, this is an odd thing here in Vancouver, seeing the moon. Rare is the night when one can see past the perpetually looming cloud deck, drizzling its grey gloom.

Remembering Armstrong and the basics of geometry, and glancing nervously around at my fellow late-night commuters, I tentatively raised my thumb to see how easy it was to abolish a world. And easy it was. The moon disappeared behind my thumb, along with an astronomical number of galaxies, quasars, super-clusters and super-massive black holes that happened to be roughly in the light cone extending from my retina and through the most opposable of my appendages.

And oddly, it did make me feel a giant.

For a moment.

Until I realized that the sun is roughly the same size, from my perspective.

And that blew my mind.

The sun and the full moon are (almost) the same size.

How else could we have a total solar eclipse?

Looking at the moon, it was hard to picture the sun as that big in the sky. It's a blinding, but ultimately small point of light, right?

Step outside the next time you can. Look at a full moon. And then take a look up during the day. Those two things are the same size in the sky.

And most interesting of all, this wasn't always so! And won't always be so! Though other, more interesting things will probably occur before we need to worry about losing our total eclipses.

Still, see how easy it is to cover either with your thumb.

And think about what a fascinating, insignificant, pale, blue dot we live on.

G'night.