As humans, it’s nearly impossible for us to comprehend the fragile and momentary nature of our inhabitation of the Earth. But if there’s any occurance on our planet that demonstrates how unusual and temporary our species’ existence is within an unthinkably vast and unsympathetic universe, it’s the natural disaster.“The urge to blame catastrophe on cosmos is strong,” astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted yesterday. “It’s even in our language: ‘DisAster’ translates from Latin to ‘BadStar.’” And it makes perfect sense: The stars, from our perspective, must have seemed an unwavering constant; a distant authoritarian calm that maps our turbulent lives.Of course we all know better today. The stars, despite their appearance, were never any more predictable than the Earth. If anything, discovering things like supernovae, black holes and gamma radiation proved it was actually our tiny planet all this time acting as a heavenly sanctuary amid an otherwise unstable and destructive cosmos.Here is our taste of cosmological hell on earth.The devastation wrought by the earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, shown here by satellite photography, is nothing compared to even the most minor catastrophic event among the stars. But it’s perhaps the closest we will get in our lifetimes to witnessing firsthand the un-nurturing, violent ways of our universe.It also allows us to appreciate something very important: We’re living in a universe that does not welcome us. Life, if anything, is a freak accident engineered by an impossibly complex equation of conditions and factors over inconceivable stretches of time and space. That we are able to live our lives with relative happiness and stability amid such chaos is something we all can, and should, be thankful for.viaABCnews
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