> Perlmutter turns it over to David Schlegel who ran the Sloan Digital Sky
> survey. He points out that before Sloan the only large maps of the
> universe were photographic plates dating from the 50s--70s. Then he shows
> a 3-D map (23:13/min). It looks like star trek's opening animation with
> stars and galaxies receding, except this is data and not illustration. The
> end result is a complex structure where most of the sources are
> concentrated and condensed in a kind of web-like curved column. It is
> composed of more than a million galaxies.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but that moment in the presentation got me misty-eyed. It's not the grandeur of the cosmos, though the cosmos is indeed grand, it's the fact that us hairless hominids, still stuck in prehistory, enslaved by the mystified forms of own labor-power, who haven't even figured out to feed ourselves properly, are capable of *thinking through* that cosmos, or at least a small part of it.
-- DRR