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June 6, 2005 Space is a big place. I mean, huge. Huge doesn't begin to cover it! Gigantic, gargantuan, damn roomy, to say the least ;) Voyager 1, launched in 1977, traveling at speeds as high as million miles per day, is just now in the process of leaving the solar system. A solar system is a star with bodies circling it, planets, moons, comets, asteroids and the like. The space inside of our own solar system is enormous, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the larger universe. If we zoom out a tad, we see many stars. Many, many stars - “billions and billions” as Carl Sagan was fond of saying. Many are complete solar systems with planets – we've started discovering planets outside of our solar system in the latter half of the 90s, and we keep finding them. But at our level of zoom, we can't see the innards of systems at all, only their bright stars. We are at the level of our galaxy, an island in space, full to the brim with solar systems orbiting the center; a huge swirling oasis in the middle of nothing. If we zoom out even more, we find galaxies clustered in bunches. The space between the galaxies is an almost incomprehensible void of vacuum. Our group is called the Local Group. If we zoom out still further, we see that the galaxies tend to be stranded together in a large super-structure of sorts, almost like the the surface of large bubbles. The space inside and around these strands and bubbles is vast ocean of black, gargantuan deserts of utter emptiness. Here is my favorite Hubble photo. It's not the most famous, nor the most colorful – there are grand pictures of nebula which take those titles. No, this picture is what you get when you point the Hubble at nothing – at a patch of seemingly black sky. Each little jewel is a galaxy containing billions of star systems. This image is a tiny, narrow section of empty sky. The scale of the cosmos should humble anyone. The human species along with every war, every language, every type of food attached to every ethnic tradition exists on a sand grain. As Carl Sagan put it [more or less], how proud some have felt, how jubilant those conquerers of history became, at having claimed tiny fractions of a dot and adding to their empires for minuscule fractions of time. Wondering about space and trying imagine the scale is a spiritual process for anyone which undertakes it. It's both nourishing and frightening. Nourishing because we are part of the cosmos in a very real way. We are stardust – we are literally made from stellar explosions; we came from places similar to those picturesque nebulae that the Hubble loves to snap. Most of the elements on the Earth, the ones found in life or in rock, originated in the stars. As a star burns through it's fuel, it makes heavier and heavier elements up to and including iron. The rest are made in a star's death throws – gold is made, for example when a star blows itself to smithereens. I'm writing this in a severe thunder storm, with tornado advisories. This planet can sure churn up the atmosphere, but this natural violence this is insignificant compared to what's possible. This leads me to the scary part of “cosmic-spiritualism”. Earth is a fragile place. The list of space-based ways to exterminate us is growing. A recently alarming one that came to my attention are large gamma ray bursts. Large is the wrong word – these bursts are so wide and so powerful, that they can strip the ozone layers of entire regions of our galaxy from planets which happen to reside there, and they can hit without any warning. Once a species acquires science with its ever increasing knowledge and technology, the race is on to spread before it's too late. How many other planets had life which arose to consciousness only to find itself snuffed out? Many possible disasters are so violent, that we wouldn't even find evidence of their demise. If a rock big enough hit us, for example, not even the pyramids would survive. We know we are in danger, now we need to do something about it. If we are a cosmic accident, then we had better preserve ourselves before another, equally dispassionate, cosmic accident winks us out. If we have been Created, then we better use our God-given brains to avoid disaster – doing nothing would be akin to suicide, and I hear the Big Man isn't much impressed with suicide. ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. Email: dahlek65@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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