(Image via It’s Okay to be Smart)

Adam Frank talks about Sagan’s immortal line, and its more prosaic but no less remarkable corollary. He does the math to describe just how much space dust is falling on us right this minute. It’s enough to make you want to stay in the shower.

(I’m actually working with some micrometeorite slides at the moment. I’m tediously scanning them, looking for the tiny craters caused by collisions with space dust. And of course the f’n stuff is all around me.)

… the force without which there would be no life, and thus no meaning or purpose … the Sun:

In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun’s rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle. This video shows those three years of the sun at a pace of two images per day.

SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. The images shown here are based on a wavelength of 171 Angstroms, which is in the extreme ultraviolet range and shows solar material at around 600,000 Kelvin. In this wavelength it is easy to see the sun’s 25-day rotation as well as how solar activity has increased over three years.

Without this huge ball of nuclear fusion, the earth would never have formed and life would never have evolved. It truly gives of itself constantly, showering earth with energy that holds the forces of entropy at bay, sacrificing its precious store of hydrogen and running out its lifespan in the process.

Grace is available only to the elect or perhaps to those who hold the proper belief or to those who live a proper life, but sunlight is available to all in equal measure. You think Jesus turning water into wine is something? With a little help from the grapevine, sunlight has been turning water into wine for thousands of years.

But the sun doesn’t give us the same warm fuzzies that God does, so screw it, let’s go to church.