An Advent thought

Notice for all Beaker People.
I'm sorry if you've all had a traumatic time. But I do think it was worth it.

I wanted you to see the stars. The light of some of them left them thousands of years ago - if you had a decent telescope that could even be millions. The light from the Andromeda Spiral set off in this direction about the time that Homo diverged from Australopithecus.   Before the first original Beaker Person erected the first trilithon at Stonehenge (with a couple of hundred mates) the light had left some of the stars in our own galaxy. There are stars that have been dead for thousands or even millions of years, that we can see through a telescope. And just think of the gaps between the stars, home of a little dust, yet at a measurably non-zero (in Kelvin) temperature.

I was trying to explain that, however it may appear, the universe does not in fact revolve around you. Gravitational theory is pretty clear about that. You are monkeys clinging to a rock orbiting a small dying ball of gas in a fantastically large, fantastically doomed universe. I was hoping to give you a grasp of this fantastic, yet sobering thought.

Now can you please all get off the floor and stop whimpering? You're immensely important really despite appearances. That's the whole point. Oh, and the noise is keeping me awake.