Throwback Thursday: Giving thanks for our Universe (Synopsis)

“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw

And despite all of that, when we pause and look around at all the good things we have -- which hopefully many of us will be doing at some point today -- we'll find something remarkable that we all have to be thankful for: the very Universe and our shared cosmic history that enabled us all to be here!

Image credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA); J. Blakeslee. Image credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA); J. Blakeslee.

That's not something to take for granted, mind you, but something that increases our awe, wonder, and sense of connectedness, if only we remember to allow ourselves to experience it.

Image credit: ESA / Rosetta Spacecraft. Image credit: ESA / Rosetta Spacecraft.

Go experience a bit of it yourself here, and happy Thanksgiving!

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And to you & yours, although thanksgiving should be every day.

And thank the Earth's atmosphere, for providing a stable oxygen content, making multicellular life possible.
Earth only ot a stable large oxygen content around 800 million years ago, same time the eukaryotes began to go multicellular and ending the "boring billion" years when not much happened. "Large" here means an oxygen content of 1% of the air.

By BirgerJohansson (not verified) on 28 Nov 2014 #permalink

That O2 is held there not by "the earth's atmosphere" but by organisms developing methods to maintain an atmosphere that increases the ability of life itself to draw entropy into the earth system as quickly as possible.

Thank those organisms we do not care for that produce no capital goods or products for capital exploitation for existing.

And consider whether the metric of capital value properly denotes worth.