nerd alert

i'll be the first to accept my descent into startling nerdiness lately with my utter fascination about space. hell, i'll embrace it. nerdiness is the confident clothed man's nudity. so there.

ive always liked this picture, once i really looked at it, because once you get past all the cliches, it is the closest thing we have to understanding the incomprehensible vastness of the universe while seeing the only thing we really know as it really is: floating in an infinite sea of dark matter.

one leading theory among astronomers that i recently read about is the infiniteness of the universe. this is generally an idea that is supposed to be too grandiose for humans to fully conceptualize. ive tried, but usually end up getting sidetracked by something more one time i threw a snowball at a car and the guy got out and chased me and my friend through the forest oh man it was crazy. wait, what?

oh, right. when i stop to think about it, the numbers and ideas are incredible: the edge of our solar system is 5 trillion miles away. it takes light one full year to travel 6 trillion miles. the nearest star to us outside of our sun is over 4 light years away. there are millions and millions of stars in our galaxy. and there are millions of galaxies with millions more stars in each. emitting out from earth at the speed of light is every radio broadcast and every image of every event that ever occurred on earth - floating out there at the speed of light waiting for some sort of eye to receive it as if earth's history is happening for the first time.

there is some evidence that suggests the universe as a whole is expanding at an exponential rate - that the universe is, in essence, infinite in size. the implication being that there are infinite versions of "earth" and infinite versions of each of us somewhere in the universe. somewhere, 3 million lights years away, there could be an exact replica of me and the entire world around me, with the only exception being that in this alternate world my alternate self is 4'6 instead of 6'4 and suffers from acute Napoleonic Syndrome, leading me to become a wealthy - albeit pint-sized - industrialist bent on space exploration.



all that to say, i signed up for SETI@home - software i read about that incorporates the processing power of personal computers around the world to mine through massive amounts of white noise recorded from deep space to search for any kind of pattern or radio signal. the idea, of course, is to search for any signs of intelligent life, which is incredibly nerdy, unlikely and fascinating all at once. i downloaded the software, considering it at least a somewhat passively remarkable contribution to the relentless search for the inevitable life of some level that exists somewhere, some how. Millions, billions, trillions of miles away and suddenly closer than ever.