Additional riffs on perspective

Perspective is gained naturally through all of life. One could not grow from a baby to child to lad to young man, raising hell, without several substantial changes in perspective. For instance, food no longer comes from boobies, but the kitchen. This is a rather dramatic shift!

Our scale of existence, once you can even gleam a comprehension, is vast beyond mind. Smaller too. Above is a series of actual stars and their sizes relative to one another. Note the change in scale from 3 to 4. Now you can see why Sol is tagged as a "dwarf star". A yellow dwarf. Bigger than many other stars (the really small ones, like Wolf 359

Never forget.), but no big kid on campus either. Least of all the brown dwarf stars, the dull runts who barely glow and are just tads bigger than Jupiter. But cheer up, little guys, you'll last till the end of time, for it is better to fade away than to burn out. And that's a current law of astronomy - mass of the star is directly correlated to their age and longevity, since size is essentially food source for the fusion engine powering all stars. Big stars burn hot and fast than go bang in nova, seeding the universe with heavier elements.

And thus the conclusion of this foray into perspective - we are stardust, man. Just about everything in us was forged in the furnace of fusion and its destruction in mighty explosion. The iron in your blood was made in and delivered from a giant star exploding, spreading matter to the 360 directions. Joining with vast hydrogen and helium clouds, these heavy metals then settled into a new star, with planets, and aye, even life. Carbon. Oxygen. Nitrogen. Gold. Everything important to us came to use directly from a star's destruction.

A nova, a smallish explosion of the outer layers of the star, and not its complete destruction. Thus the iron and other heavier elements are not dispersed. Supernova, on the other hand, result in the annihilation of the giant star  (in the star size chart above, stars in 5 and above, the bigger the star, the more awesome the destruction, of course.), and the dispersal of just about everything in it. Over the millennia, these overlapping paths of debris accumulated into you and me and everything you see, touch, or know. We are the stars, man, and they still speak inside of us. Through us. We are, as it has been said, a way for the universe to know itself.

Far out, right? Perspective.