Extra extra! The universe is really out there!

"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." -Confucius

Put on some of your favorite inspiring and hopeful music, darken the room and then just kick back and enjoy this stunning collection of photos which I compiled with the specific reason to stimulate thinking about the bigger picture. These are imo 400 of the most thought inducing pictures out there so it could take you quite a while to get through them but please take your time!

Reality Check: Mind blowing tour of our planet and the universe starts here

"The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives." -Albert Einstein

Our reality is so beautiful and utterly mindblowing in its complexity that we tend to burry our head in the sand and confine our view and thinking to the mundane drudgery of daily life. With the passing of time we have constructed this human reality of ours, layer upon layer, out of a shitload of different ideologies and technologies. Consumerism, religions, our own individualistic hopes and dreams about money, power and love, lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher, tv dinners and coca cola,... This has become our day to day reality, a reality that blinds us from nature. It's not just the stars that our cities and their lights obscure from our mind's eye. Sometimes I feel as if we are about to lose ourselves in the entertainment jungle that we have created.

People could use such a reality check to (momentarily) break free from the shackles of modern popular thinking. Yes we live in houses but we also live as self organizing neural patterns in biologically evolved machines powered by a massive nuclear fusion engine on a tiny life rich planet on one of the outer arms of the milky way in our 13.7 billion year old universe. I want you to look at these pictures and forget that you are looking at pictures. This is the universe we are living in. Try to grasp how it all fits together. Think about deep time. How did all this come to be? What does all this accumulated knowledge mean for our future? We are truly privileged to be able to access this wealth of information.

"Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite." -Francis Bacon

I started collecting these pictures a long time ago but I never wrote down their source. In other words, I wish to thank the makers of these pictures and I want you to know that I love your work! Most of them are released under the creative commons license and thus are free to use as you see fit. However, some might fall under copyright protection so if you recognize a picture you would like to see picture credited or removed, just send me a message and I will get right to it.

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart." -Helen Keller

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