The Elegant Universe.

[dimafleck: the living legend.]

WATCH IT ALL! .........on weed.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Nice link - thanks. I hope to find the time to get through it all.

I'd been thinking of this one recently, too -

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving

and revolving at 900 miles an hour,

It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,

the sun that is the source of all our power.

The Sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,

are moving at a million miles a day,

In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,

of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars,

it's 100,000 light-years side-to-side,

It bulges in the middle, 16 000 light-years thick,

but out by us it's just 3 000 light-years wide.

We're 30,000 light-years from galactic central point,

we go round every 200 million years,

And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions

in this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,

in all of the directions it can whizz,

As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,

twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,

how amazingly unlikely is your birth,

Pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,

because there's bugger all down here on Earth.

[mattm]

This is pretty good but I think Carl Sagan's Cosmos series is better. The shit he talks about and the sheer time scale is mind boggling.

Just FYI, this DVD (elegant universe) is pretty cheap at mall music stores (or was when I got it), I only paid around $15 for it (I got it and What the Bleep for a 2/$30 deal).