Imagine Being An Early Human Staring At The Aurora Boraelis, Everyone Around You Mesmerized, Wandering

Imagine being an early human staring at the Aurora Boraelis, everyone around you mesmerized, wandering if there’s something bigger than your day to day life

nightmare scenario idea: music becomes like tv/film is now, and instead of having every song virtually available at your pleasure, there are now multiple sites and apps that all have different corners of the music market, sorted by stuff like their record company, and they all have different payment plans

my heart finds a new way to break everyday

this is pretty much the best place to vent where there’s some chance of someone seeing it but not basically forcing anyone to respond or whatever

im mourning a better world that I know I’ll never get to. There’s so much in my personal life I’m sad about but rn the #1 thing bothering me is the world. I’m so goddamn scared. And also so upset, I feel like every tragedy that’s ever happened is constantly weighing me down. I just want everyone to be okay but it’s never going to happen. Some things seem so easy to fix but we just aren’t. I wish I could beam compassion and sense into everyone. I wish I was never born to witness this. It’s too much for me. But I can’t die because I’m so utterly terrified for what comes after. And I know that me dying would only bring more misery, which is the last thing I want, but it’s getting so hard. I’m so lonely and I don’t know who to talk to about all this. My best friend blocked me last year and I’m still not over it. My special interest is like half my life even though it brings me so much stress. I don’t think anyone will ever really find me attractive. Living in this world is exhausting and I have to grieve it every day. My current best friend i don’t even know what he thinks of me and I keep embarrassing myself in front of him. I know climate change or a nuclear war is gonna ruin everything and I’m trying to enjoy what time I have before that but it’s really hard. It’s so hard to feel every emotion so acutely. I don’t think I’m strong enough to fight. I think of the ways that would be the least painful to die. I can’t deal with any pain. I don’t know why my one friend is ignoring me. I know he only uses me as someone to talk at- not to- and doesn’t really care for me anymore. I don’t feel empty I am uncomfortably full. I’m so stupid and I’m not joking around or anything I just really am. why can’t everyone just have a warm place to sleep with food always available. Why can’t we get there already. What’s stopping us. Why

since the jwst is on everyone's minds right now, i want to take a second to remember voyager i, our little interstellar probe that could. it's out past the sun's reach now, traveling away from us at nearly 40,000 mph. and it carries with it the "golden record".

we knew when we sent it that it would eventually leave the solar system, and would someday -- many, many years in the future -- find another star or solar system. eventually. the laws of physics demand it.

and so we put a record of ourselves with it. just in case -- in the highly unlikely, but still possible, event that it happened upon a world with intelligent life that could understand it. our message in a bottle, cast out into the endless sea of space.

we recorded our voices, in many languages. we recorded the sounds of wild animals, of insects, of water rushing. we recorded brainwaves.

ann druyan's brainwaves, in fact. an hour of them, as she thought of all kinds of things.

she and carl sagan worked on this project together, and over the course of their work, they fell in love.

she took the time, during the recordings, to think of him, and how she felt about him.

so that love -- not just earth's existence, or its sounds, or human voices, but love -- would be sent out in our message, cast out into the ocean of space, in the distant hope that someday, somewhere, something would see it and hear us, and know us, and know how we feel.

even if voyager i never finds another life in the universe, even if the golden record is never played, i think it's important that we sent it anyway. what it says about us as a people, our hope and our optimism and our faith and our love -- we cast this all out into the stars.

"dare to cast thy bread upon the sea," indeed.