Heights of foolishness! :P

Awestricken by the magnificence - Part II

Do you know that all land on the Earth was single continuous mass? It is called PANGAEA. The whole land mass on Earth was one continent until cretaceous period. Look at the figure above to understand how gradually todays continents came into existence. Look at the small mass India which traveled as island before joining big Asian chunk! Due to Plate movements (Plate tectonics) underneath the layers of Earth, the land mass split and drifted away from each other to form todays continents. Universe is dynamic. All galaxies are moving away from each other every second.. Even Earth keeps changing.. But being ignorant of all this, we are very particular about our region, our language, our religion, our country, our nation everything about our our our... In fact the whole Earth was one.. But now so many differences crept in that we cant even imagine how it feels like having a single nation on it.. always human strove for predominance .. predominance over other country, other kingdom, other race..But doesn't it seem meaningless?? Being lucky to take birth on this beautiful Earth, shouldn't we live in harmony? After all its all one land!
We really don't care much about this .. But we give utmost importance to petty things we face every other day..
we strive hard to make money, get fame, build palaces but aren't these things ephemeral?
Why cant we just live and let others live happy? After all whatever we do is very insignificant in front of this magnificent Universe..

Awestricken by the magnificence - Part I

Never before I really felt the grandeur of our universe...
This revelation struck to me recently when I was attending a geography class..
I am spellbound.. this feeling is awesome!
Whenever we think of this Universe, we hear the phrases like we are insignificant in front of all this..
But this feeling never really sank in me..
All the history mankind has, has started only recently and it will last really short compared to the formation of the universe and transformations it is going through for billions of years.
Universe as we see today had come into existence at least as far as we know, with big bang, some 13.7 billion years ago, i.e, 13 700 000 000 years ago!
But human history starts (if u consider our ancestor ape too) just about 5-6 million years ago.. i.e, 5000000.
As we all know, sun is a star and its estimated life is 10 billion years.
Its already mid-way through and after 5 billion years it is supposed to become a white dwarf star after its death.
Earth was formed as any other planet in the solar system, but due to very comfortable temperature and atmosphere present here life has started. Once the source of energy dies, our dear Earth is deemed to die!
This doesn't matter to many of us, because our frame of reference is very small.
Everything that practically influences us has started happening only roughly around 3000 years back..
The wars we fought, the countries we split into, the books we wrote, the religions and myths we propagated, the norms we set matter the most.
We actually think that we are the masters of the world and we are going to live forever on this Earth.
But we have seen how giant animals in Jurassic period have become extinct towards the end of cretaceous period. Any small change in the universe can change very face of Earth.
But, we think that we can control any natural force and change it to our advantage!
No sooner than we started to understand our environment and invented technology to mend it for our own purposes, we started creating hazards for ourselves.
But what we can do is very insignificant in front of what has been happening in this Universe for billions of years and what might happen in future..
Even today we hardly know anything about the universe .. Where it all started? why it started? What is going to happen in future, when does it all end? how does it end? Does it really end? What lies beyond this?
People started speculating and we believe our mythological theories which were written when Man new literally nothing about the universe..To measure the extent of our ignorance it is enough to remember how we thought that Earth is the center of Universe and everything revolves around it! But till today, the myths written in that ignorant age remain guiding principles for many of us!