It's a small world

The bacteria do not have us "beaten hands down".
Each cell in outr body is a kind of cooperation bacterium....especially the Neurons.

No bacterium has the complexity to Know that it is a bacterium.....much less to "know" how big or how far Arcturus is.

No.....we humans top the list as the most complex objects yet discovered in the known universe.

We ORIGINATED as primitive bacteria,which incidentally, are not all that far behind us in complexity !

We may be complex but if that asteroid ever hits, it will be the microbes that survive

Not sure about that.

I have never seen a microbe donning a space suit and deliberately scarpering off the Earth like us humans can.

"Tranquillity Base here...the microbe has landed."

Mind you if we continue to put Gillette Shaving-Foam on the Shuttle tanks we might not escape.
We just gotta try some other type of foam.....

Wow, the Earth/planets and Sun are all so tiny, just as well, it makes it harder for "them ot there" to find us. :lol:

Getting back to the topic of small worlds - Pluto's size seem exaggerated here. It's depicted as being 3/4 Mercury's diameter, when it's actually less that 1/2.

As for human being and human minds being "the most complex thing in the Universe" - read the above pedantic point, and tell me that again.

Actually, they're not. Here's why -

Several species of toothed whale have larger brains than us, as did Neanderthals. One supposes therefore that their minds are/were too.

Brains, like silicon computers are not especially complex. They're just arrays of nearly identical components connected to each other.

The most complex physical things we know of are the Kursk at the bottom of the Barents Sea, and the Space Shuttle above it - each have about 10^7 non-identical moving parts. That dwarfs the complexity of mammal and bird bodies, which only have about 1,000 tissue types.

What makes animals so extraordinary are their "extended-phenotypes", the complex ideas and systems - the "emergent properties" they have the potential to produce. An animal's genome has only 30,000 genes - each a recipe to produce one of a handful of proteins at a specific time and location. And yet from this all-too-finite instruction-set we get a beaver's dam, a Weaver Bird's nest, the language of dolphins and the chess games of Anatoly Karpov.

We humans can be justly proud of the achievements of our past. But today it seems we are content to grow rich and fat at the expense of our fellow species, and the weaker members of our own. We are content to satisfy the same primal urges the archea and bacteria have been doing for 4 billion years.

Our lives are not so insignificant compared to the distended gas giants in these images. What's truly insignificant is our ambition.

On a lighter note. Are those pictures available in a higher quality anywhere suitable for printing and framing.

(I asked my local Baleen Whale but it just sung a haunting song back to me. I then asked my local Supercomputer "Deep Thought". It took its time and then answered intelligently........"42".)