distortions

"On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise." -Paul Ricoeur Ask anyone who's looked up at a dark sky on a clear, moonless night, and you'll immediately hear tales about how incomprehensibly vast the Universe is. Image credit: Randy Halverson, flickr user dakotalapse, from http://dakotalapse.com/. But what you're looking at isn't much of the Universe at all. In fact, practically every point of light you see, including the vast swath of stars too dim to individually resolve, comes from…