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...
![spitzer20150603-16_small.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQcpmyqBVaVdn54XoHbrRJ1J6R2SmqinHTezdhtvMCZ7B/spitzer20150603-16_small.jpg)
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
Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, keep steeming!
![wave-13 divider odrau steem](https://steemitimages.com/DQmU6tFLSzDEkxq3xneXTH74gx4vhqbcyurn9NbqxFj8jY5/wave-13.png)
Recent articles you might be interested in:
Latest article >>>>>>>>>>> | Cheaper Than Slaves |
---|---|
Trust In The Future | Motherhood Evolved |
The Hard Problems Of Life | Know Thyself |
Beware Hyperreality | Ayahuasca And DMT (And Psylocibin) |
Thanks for stopping by and reading. If you really liked this content, if you disagree (or if you do agree), please leave a comment. Of course, upvotes, follows, resteems are all greatly appreciated, but nothing brings me and you more growth than sharing our ideas. It's what Steemit is made for!
![wave-13 divider odrau steem](https://steemitimages.com/DQmU6tFLSzDEkxq3xneXTH74gx4vhqbcyurn9NbqxFj8jY5/wave-13.png)
Just for Full Disclosure, I'm invested in these crypto-currencies:
Bitcoin | Litecoin | EOS | OmiseGo | FunFair | KIN | Pillar | DENT | Polymath | XDCE | 0x | Decred | Ethereum | Carmel | XYO
![wave-13 divider odrau steem](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://steemitimages.com/DQmU6tFLSzDEkxq3xneXTH74gx4vhqbcyurn9NbqxFj8jY5/wave-13.png)
@helpie is a WITNESS now! So please help @helpie help you by voting for us here!
![Helpie_01.png](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmVNwKHPnjtaTaunEjoCr1fmyJzgwrrFNKCMYLCLcLWA4e/Helpie_01.png)
This universe is an awesome place to being born into, hopefully we realize soon enough that the ultimate form of existence is an absolute cooperation between each living being 😊
Hi @zyx066!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 3.510 which ranks you at #6085 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has dropped 17 places in the last three days (old rank 6068).
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 173 contributions, your post is ranked at #99.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server