As you read these words and listen to our podcast, we’re all riding on a ball about 8000 miles (13,000 km) across. Our rotating disco ball in space is dancing around the sun at about 67,000 mph (107,000 km/h).
Our sun is about 93 million miles (150 million km away), shooting us with subatomic particles. Probably not maliciously, but who knows? The sun might be a trickster. It’s also filling our solar system with light so we can see all the other planets, comets, asteroids, dwarf planets, and moons in orbit.
As humans, it’s nearly impossible to not put ourselves at the center of the world — we all have main-character energy. For millions of years, we puny humans have looked up at the sky and tried to understand just what the devil is going on and where we belong in the whole situation.
In this episode, we try to unpack many of the mind-blowing facts we know about space and our expanding universe — and we get real about the emotional impact of embracing our stardust origins. We talk about the condition called the Overview Effect and whether or not space smells funny. Then we recommend great books that took us there on the page, including a hopepunk story set on an orbiting space fleet, a thrilling novel about a lady astronaut, a sci-fi love story set on Mars, the autobiography of the Milky Way, and a gorgeous book about what aliens can reveal about our humanity.
Here are the books about outer space we recommend on the show:
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowell
The Mars House by Natasha Pulley
The Milky Way by Moiya McTier
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertolino
For a complete roundup of all the books we recommend, plus a full transcript and the other cool stuff we talked about, visit the Episode 60 show notes.
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Top image courtesy of NASA/Unsplash.
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