I loved Powers Of Ten which entranced my young mind with scale. A modern, interactive version was The Scale Of The Universe Flash animation which does the same job of trying to provide an emotional understanding, a kenning of our relative place in the universe.
One of my shortcomings I constantly battle is my understanding our minuscule position in both space and time but also the disproportionate effects we have on our local environment relative to that which has come before. It's a balance act between our unimportance and our utmost importance, the ineffectual nature of our existence compared to the rest of the universe and yet our unimaginable power and effects over our own human environment.
Projects like The Foundation For The Long Now make an interesting play for our awareness of the human adventure over longer periods than our own lifetimes. I'm always looking for ways to contemplate and absorb these vast and challenging ideas. What are some of yours?
Sorry I missed this post, I just tried to post it myself with the tag #time but #thehumancondition is a much better call. When looking at those grafts it provokes a sadness in me. Why? Because of how insignificant one life is in the grand scheme of things.
In me it provoked the opposite. True, as we scroll down the page the crushing aeons of time crash down onto that tiny human lifespan like so much amber petrifying a gnat and the yawning chasm of meaninglessness opens before us... But looking at it another way, I note that all of that understanding about those vast oceans of time, their categorisation, that we can even name and discuss events that happened so long ago the very atomic basis of our physical essence had yet to exist, is due to us, that tiny gnat. The vast, whirling machinery of the cosmos has spun out of the miasma atoms, and molecules, and curious long-chain proteins, and eventually us - we that can look back down ourselves and scare ourselves with our own insignificance; in itself, a not insignificant feat. It's a feeling which is principally anthropic, if you get my meaning, but I can't help but give us a pat on the back.