Forest Through The Trees

If you've ever read anything by my hand, you'll know that, whatever the subject, I usually like to not focus too much on small details; I usually go straight for the Big Picture of things, so much so that there's a real risk for me to not see the trees through the forest...

_{source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory}

For as long as I can remember, I've always had this strong sense that no individual part of a greater whole can be really understood without first understanding the greater whole. There's no way to understand any single player's behavior in a game, without understanding the game itself and the player's relation to all other players in his own team and that of the opponents. Everything connects to everything. As science progresses, we're increasingly confronted with this fact of life; we can not understand the motion of the Earth through space without knowing it's place in the Solar System, and we can not understand the Solar System without understanding that it's but a tiny part of the Milky Way galaxy. Even our own bodies are not a singular thing; your body contains "only" approximately 30 trillion human cells, compared to the 39 trillion microbial cells. As we learn more, we've come to understand that life in general takes large scale cooperation and partnerships to function:

Our picture of life is going through a major shift. Ed Yong's book I Contain Multitudes reveals that a genome generally doesn’t contain all the genes an organism needs. Symbiosis isn’t rare, it's the rule. And we're just the icing on life's vast microbial cake.
_{source: Big Think}

_{Ed Yong "I Contain Multitudes" | Talks at Google}

Yes my friend, we are legion! :-) If this of interest to you, listen to the writer in the above video; he even explains how mother's milk contains substances to feed the microbes in the baby's body, and how they probably even help shape our behavior!

I think it's only natural for people who prefer the birds-eye overview, to eventually gravitate toward the mother of all big pictures; the universe (multiverse?) itself. Now, this poses a serious challenge, because we simply don't have an actual perspective on anything outside our own planet. This has made me wonder: how on Earth (literally) do we get those pretty pictures of our own spiral arm galaxy? Even if we had a spaceship capable of light-speed travel, we wouldn't be fast enough to travel outside the Milky Way far enough to actually see it's shape. Let's go back to the forest one more time; imagine you're dropped in a specific location in the middle of the forest, and given the task to map out the position of each individual tree as to get a sense of the forest's shape, only you're not allowed to move from your location...

This is what science has done with the Milky Way, as is explained in the video below this post. All we can see from here is a difuse band of concentrated stars, somewhat milky-white, across the night sky; how do we get from there to printing t-shirts with a picture of our galaxy with a pin at the location of our own Sun in that galaxy? Dr Becky Smethurst tells, in just 15 minutes, the wonderful history and milestones in scientific progress that led us to understand the shape of the Milky Way galaxy:

_{How do we know the Milky Way is a spiral? | The Story of the Milky Way}

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