Hello everyone, please spare a few minutes and let's reminisce about our place in the cosmos. - Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” — Frank Herbert

“We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.” ― Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“So if we assume we are not the only civilisation in the galaxy, then at least a few others must have arisen billions of years ahead of us. But where are they?” — Brian Cox, Human Universe

“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.” — Hermann Hesse

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“I’m not telling you to make the world better, I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it." — Joan Didion

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years." — Carl Sagan

“The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.” ― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." — Douglas Adams

“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” ― Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth

The newer Cosmos series brought the idea back because it still works beautifully. It turns the incomprehensible scale of cosmic time into something we can actually picture.

Carl Sagan helped popularize this idea in The Dragons of Eden and on the original Cosmos series. He even compared the calendar to a football field and noted that all of human history would take up an area about the size of his hand.

With that in mind, the Solar System does not even show up until early September. Complex life on Earth only fills the last stretch of December. The entire span of human civilization unfolds in just the last few seconds of the year, which really drives home how recent we are

Midnight on January 1 marks the Big Bang, and the final seconds before midnight on December 31 represent the present moment. On this scale, each day covers almost forty million years.

The Cosmic Calendar is one of the easiest ways to make sense of the universe’s enormous age. It takes all 13.8 billion years of cosmic history and squeezes them into a single year.

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” — Franz Kafka

“Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.” ― Albert Einstein

One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are