Good Morning,
I find myself contemplating the universe a bit more these days. Not that I can change anything out there, but more about the incomprehensible size of the whole thing. With the assistance of the Hubble Telescope and other newer ones, we are now confident that there are billions (that’s with a “B”) of Galaxies out there beyond our own Milky Way. Even within our own Milky Way there are billions of stars, many like our own Sun, which is considered average in the whole scheme of things.
Our solar system now seems to be pretty typical, as planets are created and captured by the gravity of larger objects like a star. We orbit around the Sun and moons orbit around planets. When you understand the physics behind it, there is nothing very spectacular going on with moons. Our Earth has one, Mars has two, Jupiter has 63, Saturn 62, Uranus has 27, Neptune 13, Pluto has 3, Haumea has 2, Eris has 1. Mercury, Venus, Ceres and Makemake forgot to take a number when it came to dishing out moons and lost out. Didn’t know there were thirteen planets? I know, when I was growing up we only had eight and then Pluto came along and made it nine.
Personally, I think it would be pretty narrow-minded to think that our solar system is the only one…and the only one to support life, for we also know that the building blocks of life are strewn throughout the cosmos. Granted that the conditions have to be just right to support life as we know it, but why does it have to be, as we know it? The days of the church dictating beliefs and ruling the people are over, accept it, we are no longer the “center of the universe” and no longer does everything revolve around us. And…yes, that is the way it is, regardless of whether or not there are still people out there that feel the world revolves around them.
So, where does that leave us when it comes to the presence of other life “out there”? I think it may be nice to know for sure as it could put to rest the ranting of a number of fanatics who want to impose their dogma on the rest of us. But then again, there would still be a percentage that would deny the findings. You would probably find them in the same room with the ones who said we never went to the Moon or that the Holocaust never happened. You know, the ones whose collective brainpower for logical reasoning could be put on the head of a pin. I would like to believe “we” are not alone and I would also like to believe that “they” have evolved beyond the myopic and bigoted doctrinaire prevalent in the human condition of today. That being said, it will still be a very long time before we can even contemplate sending our species to another solar system.
Let’s face it the distances are so great that it would take multiple lifetimes just to get to the nearest star to us that is known to have planets. That is planets… not that they could even be inhabited by our delicate earth-centric biology. The closest is Epsilon Eridani at a mere 10.5 light years from earth. No big deal right, as we see this kind of stuff all the time in movies? All you have to do is make a powered spacecraft that can travel at 186,000 miles per second (700 million miles an hour) and then park your butt in a chair for 10.5 years in a weightless environment, hoping nothing breaks and it all stays together for that long. So far not much around my house has stayed together that long. By the way, if you are traveling at 700 million miles an hour you may not want to hit anything along the way or it is as “they” say “sayonara star traveler”. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a Holiday Inn on any the planets orbiting around Epsilon Eridani, so accommodations could be iffy at best.
Realistically, our Voyager Space Probes 1 & 2 launched in 1977 are traveling at about 35,000 miles an hour, (pretty fast actually) but they would still take somewhere around 100,000 years to get to Epsilon Eridani’s System at that speed even if they were headed that way. So let’s see, humans have been on earth for an estimated 200,000 years. Seems like we are going to be stuck here for a while. If you want to travel in space, you are either going to have to do it spiritually when you are dead or maybe just to go to Space Mountain at Disneyland. With the latter, at least that way you could be home for dinner.
It just might be prudent if we take care of what we have left on our own little planet and even find a way to stop killing each other over dissimilar philosophies about our God, which almost have to be the same one anyway. The rest I see as just individual interpretations based on sociological dogma.
But that’s just me.
Love, Dad