genties & ladlemen,

I thought I'd share, for a few moments, some "family" photos with you all.

And if you wish, you could share some as well.

Here is where I was born

Picture of observable universe,.  The different colours are the different redshifts, the more shifted to the red the light is, the quicker the emitter of that light is moving 'away from us', the more blue the quicker it is moving towards us.  You can just see the trail where the Dawkins entered our birthplace as messenger of His Noodly Appendage.

This is my fathermother.  From hir dead corpse comes my body

This is the crab nebula (one would think so, but alas, not named after Buster Crabbe).  It is a supernova remant,  The supernove was observed by the Chinese in 1054; that means that since the crab nebula is some 6,500 light years away from us, the supernova happened in 5445 BC!

These are my governors.  I can never violate them.  Though I try
These  are the laws of Thermodynamics.  They are the Supreme One that governs and looks over everything.  One of my favourite analogies is this one "You can't win the game.  You can't leave the game.  You can't even break even."

This is my landlady

The sun.  She weighs in around a modest 2 x10^30 kg and each second she uses up (converting matter to energy) around 4 million metric tons (E=mcsquared=A LOT OF ENERGY), a mere fraction of which our Earth actually gets that powers our entire biosphere.  She's around middle aged and will expand as she gets older (don't we all?) but will get a lot cooler (don't we all?).

Here is my neighbourhood
The local group of galaxies, of which the Milky Way (our galaxy) is but 1.  M31 is otherwise known as the Andromeda Galaxy.  In the distant future, both this galaxy and ours are going to collide.  What fun.

Here is my actual house, of which I am but a temporary tenant

Here are some visitors to my house (sound of meteoroids)
Click on the Listen button and listen to the instructions; it will tell you what to listen for and then be patient :3

Listen to the sounds of meteoroids going through our atmosphere live.

Here are the real tenants of my house

These are bacteria -- they came before me, I am made of bacteria, and they will be there long after I'm gone.

These are my protective big siblings (Saturn & Jupiter)

The two heavyweights, Saturn being relatively not dense that if one could build a bathtub big enough Saturn would float in it (anyone want to try?).  Jupiter has been called by Carl Sagan "the star that failed", as just barely a little more mass and we would have 2 suns; as it is, Jupiter is emitting radio waves (predicted, btw, by Immanuel Velikovsky of "Chariots of the G_ds" fame).  These two planets help keep Earth relatively impact-free.

And that's my slide show for now.  Anyone else want to give theirs?

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