If you actually lived there it would probably just seem like a lot of uninteresting empty space. It only looks interesting because what you're looking at is far beyond huge, all squashed together into one picture.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

Peanuts are a gross underestimation. More like a quark or a Planck length.

Well, I think you could live a whole life on this planet without seeing the same place twice. If you think you have seen it all, you probably didn't look close enough.

I mean, you can see every place on this planet within a few seconds if you are taking a look at some satellite photo and yet you would not have seen your house and the living beings around it. Similarly, there are many more details which we do not perceive in our everyday life and which you can explore without have to invent a couple of scientific miracles ;-)

It is not that I don't value the stars. It is just that I think we shouldn't dream of arriving at some wonderful planet one day when we already are on a wonderful planet. We just don't appreciate it like that.

Oh, I think we should dream of all of it. One does not diminish the other.

We do live in an amazing place.

If you're thinking of the LMC as an "intersting place", you're committing a pretty huge error of scale.

The really mind bending part of that is on a galactic scale the LMC is "close". :)

I'll bite. Why is LMC less interesting than other stuff? What's more interesting in your opinion?

I think OP means that LMS isn't a place per-se (like a planet, or maybe even a solar system is a "place"). It's a whole bunch a places bound together by gravity.

Even so. if you happened to live there you'd get a view of all those nebulae, and the Milky Way in the distance.

You might need eyes the size of a satellite dish to see them all though.

We can see all that from here though.

A solar system is a whole bunch of places bound together by gravity, too. What's the fundamental distinction here? That the center of mass isn't approximately one massive thing (e.g. the solar system is 99% the center -- the sun)?

That's right.

In a very shallow, simplistic sense, we see all these other amazing phenomena out there. Our home seems like a little rural backwater, crossroads and a store kind of thing, by comparison.

Exactly