"our home star is as weird as it gets"

Not even close. There are phenomena out in the universe that make our sun look like a simple, plain jane, run of the mill speck of sand.

For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergiant

"that defies the laws of physics"

Nothing about the sun defies physics. The only places in the known Universe that may defy physics is inside a Black Hole for that is where it is theorized that the law of physics starts to break down.

I knew quasars are superbright, but holy shit.

Bleah.

The quasar information is at least 25 years out of date. Quasars are now known to be the cores of active galaxies and are much more distant than our nearby neighbors.

The voiceover sounds like someone trying to indoctrinate for a cult; and the editing is for crap.

I like how the Subaru Quasar looks like a monster from an Atari game.

The first scene roughly plays out like this:
"As the candy hearts poured into the fiery quasar a wondrous thing happened, why not? They vaporised into a mystical love radiation that spread across the universe destroying many many planets, including two gangster planets and a cowboy world. But one planet was at exactly the right distance to see the romantic rays, but not be destroyed by them. Earth!

So all over the world couples stood together in joy. And me, Zoidberg! And no one could have been happier unless it would have been Valentines Day. What? It was? Hooray!"

When contemplating the meaning of life I often go back to on of the great philosophers, Whedon, who wrote:

Life's not a song.
Life isn't bliss.
Life is just this.
It's living.

Like Sisyphus the work in itself is the meaning there is. In the grand scheme of things what we do does not matter very much, videos that show the scale of the universe seems to exemplify that. I would gather that there is no real meaning (as in purpose) of our existence. We can invent a bunch of them, which are of course temporally bound, like all things are, such as "we live to better ourselves and our species". We are but a short part in a very long chain of life, our purpose could be construed as just filling that role and making sure that our species evolves - the same "purpose" all other animals have.

The first and third question seems intertwined, so I'll just answer those two together.

Morals, ethics, personal relationships, social lives, these are all bound in a very finite time period and a very small amount of space. And yet they do matter, to me. The stars and quasars are pretty indifferent to who I meet at a party, but to me it can be pretty important. It's all about perspective.

Can I imagine myself not existing? Well, yes and no. I can look at relatives and friends who are not among us anymore and relate to the void they've left - I can imagine that I would leave a similar void in other people. This is of course only transient, and my memory would be replaced at some point, or at least diminished. We make a very small dent in the universe, but we still ought to enjoy it as much as we can.

It's much harder to reconcile the fact that when I'm dead I really don't exist anymore. That won't make it any less true though. I've argued earlier that we are essentially determined biological machines and that we in principle don't have free will, this is just as hard to reconcile myself with, but the fact that it's hard to imagine, won't make it any less true. (That on may actually be false, but I doubt it.)

"As the candy hearts poured into the fiery quasar a wondrous thing happened, why not? They vaporised into a mystical love radiation that spread across the universe destroying many many planets, including two gangster planets and a cowboy world. But one planet was at exactly the right distance to see the romantic rays, but not be destroyed by them. Earth!

So all over the world couples stood together in joy. And me, Zoidberg! And no one could have been happier unless it would have been Valentines Day. What? It was? Hooray!"

I'm not entirely sure people grasp the scale of this thing. This is immensely huge and immensely "slow" because of the size. Like he said, it will take millions of years for this to happen. While the star is being devoured civilizations could be built up from nothing and collapsed again, without ever noticing it. *timeshift

The feeding super massive black hole is called a quasar, no? Quasars are awesome.

>> ^MINK:
what exactly is "smartness" ?
the way i see it, atheists do the same trick in reverse, they say "science is the way to understand the world, and science has no room for God, so... therefore... there is no God!!! I am smart now!"
Yes i know some atheists are not that retarded, but a lot are. If you say religion is incompatible with science, and then you try to use science to criticise religion, well... you're retarded.
The smart answer is to say "God is everything, therefore God is science, and atheism, and murder, and bombs, and flowers, and jealousy, and 9/11 conspiracy theories, and cheese sandwiches, and love, and DNA, and evolution, and the bit on a car engine that lets the fuel into the piston, etc ad INFINITUM"... then work on from there.


The field of science has nothing to do with religion. It has no such "goal" to disprove the existence of god and if there are atheists that claim such a thing, then they are definitely NOT scientists. Science is the very best tool we have of discovering the truth about the universe: from quarks to quasars. The UNINTENDED side effect is that such discoveries are inconvenient to religion's dogma. Note the word in caps.

History is filled with scientific advances of this kind. But let's not pretend that scientists' motivation is to "bring down" religion. You think men such as Galileo and Kepler worked out the orbital arrangement of the solar system to disprove god? They were looking for the truth, my dear boy. The insurmountable problem seems to be that religion cannot integrate these truths into their world. But then, religion does not need to. Faith is the natural enemy of truth, not the other way around. By that, I mean religion is the plaintiff and science is the defendant.

So let's all be clear: NOTHING will bring down religion. Note the word in caps.