Cosmic Loneliness

Cosmic Loneliness, originally uploaded by David Cartier.

Cosmic Loneliness

Since the dawn of the human mind, we've populated the sky with gods, in medieval times saints and madonnas appeared; in this technological age humans have imagined a sky buzzing with flying saucers and hydrocephalic bug-eyed aliens. Even if you are not given to flights of fancy it's hard to look up at the stars without feeling a longing for some confirmation of other distant intelligences. For decades now, sophisticated instruments have searched the sky for whispered echoes of consciousness. No answer comes ...
In a virtually infinite universe of evolving worlds it's counter-intuitive to consider that we could be an anomaly, a singularity. The hard reality is that in even a cosmos teeming with biology, the very scale and size of the universe, the literally unimaginable distance between the stars , the improbable pile of contingent circumstances which have resulted in ourselves ... probably conspire to make life so vanishingly rare, from our provincial perspective, as to ensure that we are well and truly alone, for all practical purposes.
It's a lonely observation , but one of those realizations, like the inevitability of death, which shouldn't be denied, but embraced as part and parcel of the marvel of existence ...

(aurora, 2/25, 15 sec. with russian Mir47 f2.5 lens)