What is Beautiful in the World?
In the midst of war, poverty, and grief, how can we find something worth living for?
What is beautiful in the world? What is worth understanding and passing along to our children? Don’t answer so quickly. Think it over. The more we consider this question the more daunting it seems.
The power of insignificance
In the immense space we call our world, we are absolutely insignificant. If we could stand next to our nearest star, we would appear so small as to be undetectable by any means known. Not to worry, the tremendous radiation of the sun would burn us to dust and then turn our dust into ions before we got anywhere near our mark.
This magnificent globe of furious energy and has been able to sustain all life on Earth for billions of years using only a small part of 1% of its energy output, yet it is so absolutely tiny in the world of stars that it would remain undetectable standing next to the largest stars we know of. In fact, it would share our fate by being ripped apart and vacuumed up into a vortex of gravitational energy. Our sun is an insignificant well of energy in the vast universe.