If you're finding this interesting, I recently discovered this YouTube channel on How Far Away Is It [1]. There's a few different playlists of what he calls digital books, that are all worth watching for a novice: How Far Away is It? [2]; How Small is It [3]; How Fast is It [4]
As a side benefit, it can be soothing and nap inducing, but in the best ways. It's taken a couple attempts to get through some of the episodes, but in the end I find the explanations pretty amazing.
I think he was a software engineer before retirement, I absolutely love his video's for the reasons you highlighted. I can tell he is interested in the subject matter and spending retirement creating these videos is very noble. I started to lose comprehension of scale after the first few and a dozen more followed.
There is also one of my favorite talks tangentially related by Lawrence Krauss. He explains that eventually a civilization exploring the universe around them will only see it's own galaxy and likely believe that's all there is.
We are living in an extraordinary time where we are still able to see other galaxies.
I can imagine scientists in a couple billion years debating whether the historic records of other galaxies existing should be believed or whether one should dismiss them as crazy religious texts someone faked a couple million years ago...
(obviously by then we'll probably uploaded ourselves to computers and turned into totally different beings from what we are now, but the problem of trusting historic data still exists)
I know you’re joking, but I’m genuinely wondering, would that actually resolve the problem of (then) ancient forgery?
Our proof-of-work difficulty is trivial compared to what’s possible a few thousand years from now. So for people a million years from now to trust our records, they’d also have to trust people a thousand years from now not to simply have forged our part of the blockchain, which might be trivial for them given their hash power.
As a side benefit, it can be soothing and nap inducing, but in the best ways. It's taken a couple attempts to get through some of the episodes, but in the end I find the explanations pretty amazing.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/howfarawayisit [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpH1IDQEoE8QWWTnWG5cK... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKbZeUvPnWI&list=PLpH1IDQEoE... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE4SpkTOY1A&list=PLpH1IDQEoE...