I'm the same person as Raimond De Tempe - as to see in this place from the year 2002. And yet I arrived here in the year 2000 for my first activity. Both were than for Seti@home.
From early youth on I was very interested in astronomy (my year of birth 1942).
It is the beauty of an nature we little humans cannot really change - so we live on this tiny planet together with some older living participants, like e.g. the ants, or green algae.
I think the only fundamental difference wich that other kind of living animals is our capacity to philosophy not only about the reality around us, and the possible reasons of our being (may be the only reason that we can think about it), experiencing the beauty of it, but also to construct theories of this all that are more fundamental than older man-made stories about the gods in the sky.
It is such a short time that we know about te real distances in the universe! More than two centuries ago it was a serious astronomical sence that the galaxy was the bulk of the universe (Herschel's model of the Milky Way). And this model survived for more than a 100 years. With Kapteyn a changement was growing. And the second Copernican revolution happened with the discussion between Shapley and Curtis, in 1920. A few years later Hubble did give the certain view: our Milky Way is a common star system, may it be a somewhat big one. The 2nd Copernican revolution - less than 100 years old!

In short: astronomy has a central place in the questions of who we are, of being and place in the concept of reality.

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