Doug's Darkworld

The Virgo Galaxy Supercluster, yes, those are are galaxies! 200 trillion stars. About 50 million light years away. Who knows how many “Earths” we are seeing in this image. And they of course are at this very moment looking at our galaxy, of course as it was 50 million years ago. What was life on Earth like 50 million years ago? Surprisingly familiar actually. Trees and grass and plants of course, very much like we have today. Ants and bees and birds and bats and butterflies were around. In fact most of the smaller animals we take for granted were established by then, even if not exactly the same as we see today. Only when we saw larger animals would it get weird. There were primitive whales, camel like things, vaguely elephant like things, but nothing really that would fit into our familiar modern categories. Still, we’d get used to it pretty quick. And they’d be just as tasty as modern animals … and vice versa I suppose.

This image (click here for a larger version) is just really cool to me. I run across a lot of stuff like that. Cool stuff that I want to share, or comment on … but there’s not really enough to write a full blog post on. Even worse, due to some recent major changes in my personal life, I’m not having a whole lot of spare time right now to do writing of any sort. Or more on point, I’m not getting the sort of time I need to write dedicated column style blog posts. This sucks, since I love writing and blogging. So, dear readers, I am making a change on Doug’s Darkworld. Henceforth I will be posting far more often, but few of the posts will be the 800 word column style posts I have been focusing on for the past few years.

I don’t know if this will be an improvement or not, but it will mean I will be posting far more material on far more topics. It will be a change. I’m hoping it will be a change for the better. As always, questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Doug,   11 May 2011