I picked up a magazine at the airport and read this interesting tidbit from Alyssa Goodman, PhD, a professor of Astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:
"The thing that's grand about spending your time thinking about the universe is that it makes you feel insignificant. I don't mean that in a bad way. If you understand that we've not discovered entire solar systems that contain planets similar to Earth, and that those are just the ones we know about, since most of the stars we've looked at are within about 300 light years of Earth and the distance to the center of our galaxy is nearly 110 times that - then you realize that the laundry you've left undone and the dumb thing you said yesterday are about as significant as slime mold."
Phew.
