It was a fun video to make but it was a bit too spontaneous for its own good. I was moving out of my apartment and decided to go on a sudden night time adventure since the date of my leaving coincided with the peak of the 2013 Perseids meteor shower in my city.
I had as much fun making the video with my friends as I did thinking of the grand ideas I wanted to present on that night by the lake as the meteor shower fell in over our heads. In the end, the video was shot well enough. I definitely tried to channel my inner Brian Cox.
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| Sadly not a pic from that night, but what I wouldn't give to capture something like this. |
Reverie aside, I felt a tinge of disappointment as I was splicing the video together weeks later. Because of the level of spontaneity of the video I did not have long to prepare the material that I wanted to deliver regardless of how inspired I was to deliver it on that night.
YouTube is hard work, you would think that I would be thoroughly seasoned in this after all these years. Some things just end up getting lost between planning and execution. Its like channel interference in a communication system. But after all that I have been through I have managed to pick up a thing or two.
The main idea that ultimately inspired me to make a video that night was this sense of interconnectedness that we all share with the universe that we live in. This connection exists whether we realize it or not. It is found in how our existence has been shaped by the Universe that we occupy and in how we are now able to greatly affect the state of our own tiny little part of that Universe that we call Earth.
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| More than just being a part of the Universe, we are the Universe. It is inside us. |
In ancient times the arrival of an interplanetary traveller like a comet would normally be considered an omen heralding some sort of special event like the death of a king or the fall of an empire. Human beings have always sought to connect themselves with the world they live in. In times where we lacked the proper knowledge to build a more or less accurate connection we created stories and rituals to bridge the gap in our relationship with the world around us.
For most of the time we didn't know any better. We didn't know how connected we truly were. We didn't know that the building blocks for life on Earth could have been seeded by a similar cometary traveller billions of years ago. We didn't know that those same building blocks were created from the nuclear hearts of massive stars that had to die just so that we could live. For most of the time it was just the big bad scary Universe and the humans. Only our made up stories gave us some hope for a connection to any of it despite the much richer reality that persisted all along.
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| It doesn't matter whether it makes you feel big or small. You a living part of it. |
The universal nature of Science provides a way of bridging that gap in understanding more than any made up story ever could and ever will. It brings us closer than ever before to the meteor shower, to the stars we see at night, to the particles that coalesce to make us up and ultimately closer to ourselves and every other human being on planet Earth.
On that night as the meteor shower rained above us I wondered of all the humans that had ever seen a meteor shower and the meteor shower itself. I thought of how much more related the two really were, and in a Universe that may not be made for us ...
It was much closer than we would normally think.
Sincerely,
SonOfTerra92
1/10/2013
