It's hard to learn about the universe, the grand physics ordering all these swathes of gas, cosmic oddities, powers and chunks of rock, that immense sphere of prolific fusion energy, our star, our ancient blue planet, out of the immaculate conditions of iterative solar and terrestrial formation, the mysterious, bewildering, brilliant start of biological L I F E, its grubby attempts to endure and survive through all the turmoil and skulduggery its host land musters out of its own nature, its tremendous, single-minded persistence, its collective ancestral will to live and will to power, spanning cycles of generations, life and death, its devastatingly wonderful machinery powering evolution of familiae, genera, species, and the meagre skinflint of that ape, homo sapiens' trampling on this earth, and not be blown away, just blown away by it all.
I've said this before, yet this always takes my mind away: one part in two billion of the sun's energy falls on the earth. Out of that sliver of juice, all of life as we have it is given. I honestly can't deal with that knowledge.
