Last night, we took a midnight drive into the desert for a chance to catch the Leonids at their peak intensity. It wasn't altogether without its hiccups -- the air smelled kind of weird, I got sand in my clothes and hair, I had too much catch-up work to ever justify staying up so late, and try as we did, we almost but never totally escaped all light pollution around the horizon.
Not that any of it mattered -- it hardly seems to, whenever something like the night sky makes you feel really infinitesimally small in the universe. It's a crazy thing to think about: these meteor showers are just space dust and debris, little remnants of a comet trail dating back to 1400s. For over five centuries, this whole stream of rocks has been whirling around the sun, left behind at a time when the printing press on Earth was the technological bombshell of its day. Back then, Copernicus wasn't even born yet, much less Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and everyone else who made it possible to even predict these showers from year to year, and here I am teaching to premeds, in mere weeks, what took them entire lifetimes to accomplish. Every shooting star in the sky was a piece of cosmic litter that had been sitting in our solar system for generations upon generations, through every terrible and amazing thing we've done in a species in all that time, only to burn up this very year in the fragile atmosphere of our tiny planet.
It boggles the mind. Anyway, hopefully someone else also looked up for a night and wished for something nice.
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"...in mere weeks, what took them entire lifetimes to accomplish", keep in mind what it will take your entire life to accomplish may also take very little time, if any, for later generation to digest. If that little time scales into weeks, or even days, you would be a great man.
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