Totally awesome

“Awesome” is one of those words that’s become so stretched out, abused and misapplied that it’s become almost useless. The features of a new smart phone are not awesome. It’s not awesome that somebody remembered how you like your coffee. Even the Queen’s house is not awesome, and yours certainly isn’t. “Artist”, “curated” and “essential” are akin to it in terms of being useful, necessary words that are rapidly being emptied of all meaning. They’re turning into reflexive lexical burps, semiotic zombies that shamble on through the language mainly because they’re only dimly aware that they’re already dead. “The artist’s minimalist re-interpretations of Star Wars characters are now available as prints on her website”, “their boutique in Chelsea features an immaculately curated selection of high-end fashion brands”, “this season’s essential new heels”; they’re all profoundly wrong– and lazy– usages that turn our language into a barrage of empty marketing messages instead of a means of discourse for balanced human beings who connect with our world and with each other in ways that might enable us to truly feel that combination of fear, admiration, beauty, incomprehension, and amazement that used to be known as awe. Or that might enable more of us to recognise that a real artist is the conduit for a much more profound and ineffable transformation of her or his source materials (including other peoples’ previous work) than most smirking pasticheurs or hipster superfans can even imagine, and that to be a curator means at root to take care, to respond and maintain and nurture, not to intervene or impose one’s own values or whims.

Let me show you something that is truly awesome, something that makes me afraid of my smallness in the universe and staggered at the infinite beauty and incomprehensible majesty of all the things that are going on in that universe right now while we carry on our silly little lives, mostly blind and oblivious, on one tiny planet that’s a mere speck even within our own solar system. It fills me with joy and terror.

On the 31st of August 2012, a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) erupted from the surface of our sun, and this real image of it was captured by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre (more / larger images at the link, both images reproduced here CC licensed by NASA). What you’re seeing here is a vast chunk of helium plasma from the sun’s atmosphere, heated by nuclear fusion and sculpted by immense magnetic fields. How vast?

There are at least 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone, of which our sun is a relatively unremarkable example as stars go. It is 1.39 million km in diameter, with an estimated energy output of 385 million billion gigawatts. Its surface temperature is 5,505°C. It is about 4.6 billion years old. Please don’t ever use the word “awesome” about anything less mind-blowing than this picture and its implications.

Update: I found a video of the CME. You’ll probably want to mute the music, which sounds like the bed for a banal corporate video montage of warehouse workers stacking boxes. The video is more compiled than edited. Seriously, NASA, employ a professional editor; there’s no shortage of them. But that aside, worth a watch… especially if you constantly bear in mind the size of the Earth as shown above.