Biv

“What aspects of yourself would you fight to protect, as if you were fighting for your life?”
― Frances Hardinge, Deeplight

“Yet, the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth. When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe with its galaxies hurdling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionally represented among them. When I pour over the data that established the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day, every 24 hour rotation of Earth, people kill and get killed in the name of someone else's conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God kill in the name of needs or wants of political dogma. When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity, sometimes I forget that too many people act in wanton disregard for the delicate interplay of Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and land, with consequences that our children and our children's children will witness and pay for with their health and wellbeing. And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves. I occasionally forget these things because however big the world is in our hearts, our minds, and our outsized digital maps, the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“When the universe was half its current age, a very blue and very faint species of intermediate sized galaxy thrived. We see them. They hail from a long time ago, representing galaxies far far away. Their blue comes from the glow of freshly formed short-lived, high-mass, high-temperature, high-luminosity stars. The galaxies are faint not only because they are distant but because the population of luminous stars within them was thin. Like the dinosaurs that came and went, leaving birds as their only modern descendant, the faint blue galaxies no longer exist, but presumably have a counterpart in today's universe.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“When it's winter in one place it is summer in another. When I return to Palo Alto, to the pallid walls of courtrooms and legal documents and media headlines, hearing the echoes of heels on tiles, I would also hear the tink tink tink. I would remember that this world also exists, and that I can exist in it. This world is just as real as that one.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name