"How we envy you, envy you! Lucky humans, who can close your minds to the endless deeps of space! You have this thing you call… boredom? That is the rarest talent in the universe! We heard a song — it went ‘Twinkle twinkle little star…’ What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength, and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
You guys are waking up in the morning without screaming? Or just not about the stars thing?
This is from a fantasy world. The not screaming is one of the ways you can tell.
You guys are getting to sleep, and not just screaming all through the night?
Not helpful at all. It wasnt even a star, it was the anti collision light of a 747 going from Heathrow to Dulles…
Maybe it’s about a neutron star. Those are typically on the order of 10 km radius. And it’s hard to know their exact composition, which is why cosmologists dream up fun terms like “nuclear pasta” for degenerate matter.
Did a star draw this
We are made of star stuff, so kinda!
Hey buddy, they admitted they didn’t know what the star even was.
Literally the next line.
Apparently the sun’s spectral absorption lines were discovered 4 years before the song was made
Huh for some reason I’d never considered that fact that the songwriter would have no idea what a star consisted of. Just a mysterious light in the sky.
Interesting, I think of the lyrics as describing the way a baby or toddler feels when looking at the stars. They don’t know what those bright lights are yet, they just know they’re shiny and too high up to reach.
Comic by Will Santino, who’s name was conveniently cut off from the bottom.
Oh right, Ted.
I’m trying to make “twinkle twinkle star-whose-angular-size-from-earth-appears-small” scan but it’s proving a challenge…
The same planet where a dude figured out that everything is relative.
It’s not written about the sun
it doesn’t say it’s the sun in the picture
All stars are significantly bigger than earth
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/116663-smallest-known-star
By mass. But in terms of dimensions there are many stars smaller than Earth.
Incorrect. The smallest known star is 7 times larger than earth
Then again it could be super close and the size of a potato.
Written ironically by an alien astronaut.