Commemoration | Marking the occasion Token of remembrance Fanfaronade in the sky |
T
he Forth of July is my personal favorite holiday. It is relatively low key and has not evolved into a long drawn out commercial exercise. It celebrates the dawn of the United States, a country founded on lofty principles. Within the constraints placed on any organized society, we remain relatively free and able to pursue individual aspirations.
When placed in a larger context, however, the whole notion of nation-state seems infinitesimal. Over the short recorded history of this planet, all previous powerful and dominant civilizations have eventually receded. These culture pattern life-cycles are diminutive when placed on geological time scales; the Earth is about 4,570 million years old, the Universe is about 12 billion years old. And of course this planet is tiny - the size of the Universe is immense when measured relative to the size of the Earth: 27.4 light years compared to 1/24th of a light-second. The Sun is a single star among 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Within the Universe there are about 100 billion galaxies, each with a comparable number of stars.
