Back Down to Earth
There are times when I find myself fixating on our universe with all of its mysteries and as-of-yet unknowns. But every time I think about the universe, I think about nothing as much as its size, about its unfathomable massiveness.
Light travels at 186,282.397 miles per second or 669,000,000 miles per hour. As far as we can tell, that’s as fast as we’re ever going to go because that’s the physics-enforced intergalactic speed limit. Neither information, nor matter will be found moving faster than that. That is pretty fast. Although, as fast as it is, it would leave any space explorers traveling at that speed extremely unsatisfied with their journeys.
Light arrives on the earth from our sun in just under 8-and-a-half minutes. It takes light around 50 minutes to reach Jupiter from the sun. For light to get to Pluto, it requires 5 hours and 30 minutes of travel time. That’s longer than it takes me to drive from San Antonio to the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex area without stopping in a car going 70 mph. And this is light we’re talking about!
Remember, this is as fast as we’ll likely ever go. Our fastest ship now won’t exceed 47,000 miles an hour—nowhere even remotely close to the speed of light. At our current rate of achievable speed, it would take us at least 2 years just to reach Mars in a shuttle. At its furthest point, Mars requires a 12.8-minute trip for light to arrive.
It takes light 1.3 seconds to go from the moon to the earth, which is the equivalent distance of making 20 trips from the U.S. eastern coastline to Australia’s Alice Springs. So while light may be fast, it is reduced to a snail’s crawl when we factor it into our vast universe.
Not counting any other mysteries, the shear size of the cosmos is enough to dumbfound us. Studying the universe makes us take our focus off of ourselves and onto bigger and grander things. Let’s try and imagine the universe further.
We’ve seen that the speed of light, the fastest speed we can ever rationally hope to obtain, appears sluggish when compared against the distances in our own solar system, but that’s just our solar system. We haven’t even gotten around to considering the next star over. We can’t even leave our star’s orbit without light speed in any workable timeframe.
With light speed, we’ll hit our closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, in 4.4 light years. Borrowing a stick of butter from a neighbor next door is only convenient when we’re NOT talking about neighboring star systems. But we are talking about solar systems, not galaxies.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is composed of at least 220,000,000,000 stars that are as far apart from each other (and some more so) than our sun is from Proxima Centuari. If you want to try and get a mental picture of our galaxy, imagine a huge punchbowl spilling over with sugar. Each granule of sugar is a sun and every one of those suns is a solar system, many with numerous planets orbiting them. It takes light 100,000 years to cross from one side of a galaxy to the other.
And how many galaxies are there of billions of stars? To date, we’ve discovered about 255,000,000,000 galaxies—like and unlike our Milky Way. And we’re discovering between 25 and 125 new galaxies everyday.
Some are spiral, some spherical, and some are blobs that are called irregular galaxies. Some look like crabs and others like sombreros. Many of the stars in the sky are sending us light that is tens of millions of years old. Many of the galaxies that are visible only in very powerful telescopes do not even exist anymore by the time we see their light.
Yes, the universe being so big, it makes us think about bigger things. It took us a long time as a race to learn that it’s ok to gaze at the heavens without fear of being tried as an Observer of Times and burned at the stake. People have been thinking small for so very long, and so it’s not surprising that it takes a few of us a longer time to come around to exploring and learning without superstitious shackles.
Still, those who are holding us back grieve me greatly. I know that as I type, so many who will read my words are of the opinion that when all of these giant stars die in about 208,000,000,000 years in the future, that there will be souls still frying in Gehenna because they once transgressed the law of a Great Spirit who set up one small planet around one small star at one insignificant corner of one insignificant galaxy.
To some, the heavens declare the glory of God and the heavenly bodies are celestial evangelists singing God’s praises and glory. In their minds, if the planets and the stars could talk, they’d say: “Obey God and Jesus who is God’s Son. They created us. We exist to tell of their greatness.” That conviction is so very juvenile and so comical on so many levels.
No faith and no conviction of dogma can come of watching the stars and taking in the universe. The universe is too big for any faith and even for God. Even if a god could create it, he wouldn’t know what to do with it. No tribal blood-god of vengeance like Yahweh who taught men to cut the foreskins off of penises and slaughter enemy tribes could be the one responsible for creating the Crab Nebula or NGC 1097 or Sirius B.
And yet, according to some, we are to believe that the pronouncements of damnation made by bloody priests and popes and notable revolutionary theologians throughout the ages are sound and will one day come true. I spit on those pronouncements and the mentality behind them. How is it, one must ask, that a cosmos-creating deity who has his mind on building nebulae can be offended by anything we could ever say or do?
Is it possible to think that after centuries of fighting and warring, and persecuting with the pointing of chipped and reddened swords, that a Hebrew deity who wrote about stoning adulterous wives and thighs swelling and rotting (Numbers 5) was the mastermind behind quantum mechanics? Did a God who commanded the burning of blasphemers providentially create the telescope and arrange the funding for institutions like MIT and NASA so that we could better come to understand phenomena like “dark matter” and black holes?
Just when my mind would soar to focus on higher and grander things, I am brought back down to earth by those who stand in the way of progress so that we can continue disputing the words of a Hebrew war-god and Daniel's "covenant with many for one week." We have to get tired of this eventually. But eventually will never come soon enough!
(JH)
Light travels at 186,282.397 miles per second or 669,000,000 miles per hour. As far as we can tell, that’s as fast as we’re ever going to go because that’s the physics-enforced intergalactic speed limit. Neither information, nor matter will be found moving faster than that. That is pretty fast. Although, as fast as it is, it would leave any space explorers traveling at that speed extremely unsatisfied with their journeys.
Light arrives on the earth from our sun in just under 8-and-a-half minutes. It takes light around 50 minutes to reach Jupiter from the sun. For light to get to Pluto, it requires 5 hours and 30 minutes of travel time. That’s longer than it takes me to drive from San Antonio to the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex area without stopping in a car going 70 mph. And this is light we’re talking about!
Remember, this is as fast as we’ll likely ever go. Our fastest ship now won’t exceed 47,000 miles an hour—nowhere even remotely close to the speed of light. At our current rate of achievable speed, it would take us at least 2 years just to reach Mars in a shuttle. At its furthest point, Mars requires a 12.8-minute trip for light to arrive.
It takes light 1.3 seconds to go from the moon to the earth, which is the equivalent distance of making 20 trips from the U.S. eastern coastline to Australia’s Alice Springs. So while light may be fast, it is reduced to a snail’s crawl when we factor it into our vast universe.
Not counting any other mysteries, the shear size of the cosmos is enough to dumbfound us. Studying the universe makes us take our focus off of ourselves and onto bigger and grander things. Let’s try and imagine the universe further.
We’ve seen that the speed of light, the fastest speed we can ever rationally hope to obtain, appears sluggish when compared against the distances in our own solar system, but that’s just our solar system. We haven’t even gotten around to considering the next star over. We can’t even leave our star’s orbit without light speed in any workable timeframe.
With light speed, we’ll hit our closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, in 4.4 light years. Borrowing a stick of butter from a neighbor next door is only convenient when we’re NOT talking about neighboring star systems. But we are talking about solar systems, not galaxies.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is composed of at least 220,000,000,000 stars that are as far apart from each other (and some more so) than our sun is from Proxima Centuari. If you want to try and get a mental picture of our galaxy, imagine a huge punchbowl spilling over with sugar. Each granule of sugar is a sun and every one of those suns is a solar system, many with numerous planets orbiting them. It takes light 100,000 years to cross from one side of a galaxy to the other.
And how many galaxies are there of billions of stars? To date, we’ve discovered about 255,000,000,000 galaxies—like and unlike our Milky Way. And we’re discovering between 25 and 125 new galaxies everyday.
Some are spiral, some spherical, and some are blobs that are called irregular galaxies. Some look like crabs and others like sombreros. Many of the stars in the sky are sending us light that is tens of millions of years old. Many of the galaxies that are visible only in very powerful telescopes do not even exist anymore by the time we see their light.
Yes, the universe being so big, it makes us think about bigger things. It took us a long time as a race to learn that it’s ok to gaze at the heavens without fear of being tried as an Observer of Times and burned at the stake. People have been thinking small for so very long, and so it’s not surprising that it takes a few of us a longer time to come around to exploring and learning without superstitious shackles.
Still, those who are holding us back grieve me greatly. I know that as I type, so many who will read my words are of the opinion that when all of these giant stars die in about 208,000,000,000 years in the future, that there will be souls still frying in Gehenna because they once transgressed the law of a Great Spirit who set up one small planet around one small star at one insignificant corner of one insignificant galaxy.
To some, the heavens declare the glory of God and the heavenly bodies are celestial evangelists singing God’s praises and glory. In their minds, if the planets and the stars could talk, they’d say: “Obey God and Jesus who is God’s Son. They created us. We exist to tell of their greatness.” That conviction is so very juvenile and so comical on so many levels.
No faith and no conviction of dogma can come of watching the stars and taking in the universe. The universe is too big for any faith and even for God. Even if a god could create it, he wouldn’t know what to do with it. No tribal blood-god of vengeance like Yahweh who taught men to cut the foreskins off of penises and slaughter enemy tribes could be the one responsible for creating the Crab Nebula or NGC 1097 or Sirius B.
And yet, according to some, we are to believe that the pronouncements of damnation made by bloody priests and popes and notable revolutionary theologians throughout the ages are sound and will one day come true. I spit on those pronouncements and the mentality behind them. How is it, one must ask, that a cosmos-creating deity who has his mind on building nebulae can be offended by anything we could ever say or do?
Is it possible to think that after centuries of fighting and warring, and persecuting with the pointing of chipped and reddened swords, that a Hebrew deity who wrote about stoning adulterous wives and thighs swelling and rotting (Numbers 5) was the mastermind behind quantum mechanics? Did a God who commanded the burning of blasphemers providentially create the telescope and arrange the funding for institutions like MIT and NASA so that we could better come to understand phenomena like “dark matter” and black holes?
Just when my mind would soar to focus on higher and grander things, I am brought back down to earth by those who stand in the way of progress so that we can continue disputing the words of a Hebrew war-god and Daniel's "covenant with many for one week." We have to get tired of this eventually. But eventually will never come soon enough!
(JH)