"My God, It's Full Of [Over 100,000] Stars!"

Like a large, bright kaleidescope.

WHAT IS GALILEO DOING TONIGHT?

I find it irresistible not to at least take a moment to wonder aloud about what Galileo is doing tonight. My hope would be that the great man is resting in peace and that his head is not spinning in his grave. How, now, can Galileo possibly find peace when so many top-rank scientists refuse to speak out clearly, loudly and often regarding whatsoever they believe to be true about the distinctly human-induced, global predicament presented to the family of humanity in our time by certain unbridled "overgrowth" activities of the human species from which global challenges visibly issue now and loom ominously on the far horizon?

Where are the thousands of scientists who have a responsibility to stand up with those who developed virtual mountains of good scientific research regarding overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species that are now overspreading and threatening to engulf the Earth.

Perhaps there is something in the great and everlasting work of many silent scientists that will give Galileo a moment of peace in our time.

What would the world we inhabit look like if scientists like Galileo adopted a code of silence, speaking only about scientific evidence which was politically convenient, economically expedient, religiously condoned and socially correct?

Steven Earl Salmony

AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,

established 2001

http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

That is one very cool picture.

A lovely photo and an excellent post.

"How, now, can Galileo possibly find peace when so many top-rank scientists refuse to speak out...[snip]....Where are the thousands of scientists who have a responsibility to stand up"

Observing what happened to Galileo?

Don't know if it was intentional on your part, but your title immediately brought to mind the "quote" that made Carl Sagan famous "Billions and Billions", and also the Far Side cartoon of Sagan as a young boy pointing up at the night sky: "Look, there must be hundreds of them!"

Don't know if it was intentional on your part...

It's a play on the quote from Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Wow what an incredibly beautiful picture! Thats what I call my tax dollars at work!

Since you're quoting sci-fi greats, allow me these excerpts from Isaac Asimov's unforgettable story Nightfall, about a world with 6 suns and continuous daylight, whose inhabitants have never known darkness, on the eve of a night that occurs only once every 2000 years, causing a collapse of civilization and the witnessing of the legends called "stars"

With the slow fascination of fear, he lifted himself on and turned his eyes toward the blood-curdling blackness of the window.
Through it shown the stars!
Not Earth's feeble thirty-six hundred stars visble to the naked eye--Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indiference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.

I always took that to indicate that the planet was in a globular cluster, like M13 in the image.

"Light!" he screamed.
Aton, somewhere, was crying, whimpering horribly like a terribly frightened child. "Stars--all the Stars--we didn't know at all. We didn't know anything. We thought six stars is a universe is something the Stars didn't notice is Darkness forever and ever and ever and the walls are breaking in and we didn't know we couldn't know and anything--"