I forwarded to Paul Monk a link to this video:

He replied, within minutes:

Truly awesome.

It prompts the thought that the biggest revolutions in worldview have been scientific and have entailed:

1. Moving from the Earth centred (Aristotelian/Biblical) cosmology (which had its counterparts in many tribal myths and the cosmogonies of many other civilizations; though the classical Atomists began to guess at the truth and this was picked up again by Giordano Bruno in the late 16th century, only to get him burned alive in Rome by the Inquisition) to first a heliocentric one, then a Milky Way one, then a Hubble 3D one, as it were, and finally to a multiverse one;

2. Discovering that we are evolved creatures and have a direct biological ancestry going back 3.8 billion years, but on a world that, in much less than that time into the future (regardless of what we do) will become uninhabitable, as the Sun swells to become a red giant and destroys the Goldilocks Zone which makes life on Earth possible;

3. Realizing that we live in and are imbricated in a world of microbes that used to dominate the planet, exist in a highly complex symbiosis with larger life forms, including predation upon them and have played a substantial role in the mass extinctions.

4. Slowly getting to understanding human history from a global and cosmopolitan perspective instead of from narrowly local ones; and

5. Developing the elements of a universal cognitive humanism with the exploration of languages and linguistics, comparative mythology (Levi-Strauss and structuralism) and anthropology (including Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, about a century ago).

My own worldview, if you like, is that all these things transcend (trump) the epistemological claims of the old religions and mythologies, as well as those even of 19th century political ideologies (to say nothing of crude 20th century ones such as Nazism and Marxism-Leninism). BUT the vast majority of human beings on the planet know almost nothing of all this and certainly have not been able to weave it together into a coherent new, shared, universal worldview for the 21st century.

Just a few thoughts on the run, or rather while viewing Andromeda.