It's easy to think of things like rains, hills, or sunshine as earthly. But think how many places out there have rains, hills, sunshine.
Almost everything you associate with Earth is out there in incomprehensible quantity.
Look straight ahead of you. What's there? Whatever you see—yes that—and about half of the universe behind that.
When you take a long flight over the ocean, and you land, and you notice that this new place is real, just as real as your own, yet feels so different...
That's arriving in a new star system, landing somewhere you can put your feet. Hey look, there's rock. There are breakers. Little puddles of water bake in the sun. Sand is over there, oh wow, and there's a pebble beach. You can pick up pebbles and skip them. The sun is different, but it's more of the same. It's star.
Neither of us has any idea how much of that is out there, other than: it's more than we imagine.
If you think an ant is small and expendable, never forget that you're about the same size. The difference seems big to you, but if it were really big, you'd have difficulty comprehending the scale separation. An ant feels small to you because you're almost the same in size. An atom doesn't feel small to the stomach. We have little comprehension of it.
This isn't abstract. Try to feel how much damn rock is out there, out in space orbiting, spinning, heating and cooling at the same time, forming new chemicals. How many galaxies of that. How many galaxy-sized containers of rock evolving like that? Trying to feel it all is like trying to pick up a brick wall. You're going to lose traction. That's very concrete.
The July 19, 2013 Cassini image of Earth from Saturn (The Day the Earth Smiled), Earth glinting under its rings, was the prompt for these efforts to express the wonder I feel. It's as if those rings are a foreign airport terminal, a very foreign one.
