Quote:
Originally Posted by TLAM Strike
Its sad we have lost that spectacle of space travel. What do people my age (25) have to remember? If they are a little older they remember the Challenger. Most my age will remember the Columbia. All tragedies. Most will forget the probes that landed on Mars and Titan, there is just something about a human standing on alien soil saying "we came in peace for all mankind" that inspires us to greatness.  |
There are the probes on Mars, but I think what impresses younger people today the most is the huge library of pictures we got of Deep Space objects. To me these are the spectacle of today.
Astronomy is a spectacle that is hierarchically structured: Star System in galaxies in local groups in superclusters in the cosmic web. The dimensions are unimaginable, and better than using numbers to learn aboiut them is to try to grasp them in scaled analogies. However, the fascination does not end up there: in the reverse direction, into the small, again you are being confronted with these incredible relations between small and smaller objects and atoms and subnuclear particles - and the unbelievable ammount of empty space between them.
Carl Sagan said: "
We are all made of star stuff". He meant that the atoms we are made of all have been recycled several times already in the nuclear fusuin of emerging stars at the beginning of their lives, or the nuclear reaction when stars died. I would say additionally to him: "
We, and everything that is, are all made of nothing but empty void." We are just forms without substance. We are dreams, shadows of images and ideas. Potentials. Why do I think of probability clouds now, like they use the term in particle physics when they say farewell to the idea of material smallest objects and startb to think of them as abstract "tendencies to be" only?
The Ultra Deep Field photo by Hubble is commented by the author with something like that the universe is 78 billion lightyears across. but do not be mistaken, since light travels one lightyear in distance per year (= ~9.5x10^12 km), we cannot see anything that is beyond the range of around 15 billion lightyears, since that is the estimated age of the universe. The observable universe thus cannot be greater than 2x14 billion lightyears (= ~2.6x10^23 km) and this only when we sit right in the "middle" of it. what the author points at are models concluded on by examining background radiation, that indicate that the universe actually does not end at the border to which we can see, but that it continues beyond that. Other values mentioned even consider 150+ billion lightyears as size if the total universe, but most of it we just cannot see since light has had no time to get from there to us. And it is still expanding! So, the real great unknown, I mean: the
really real unknown
- does not begin earlier than 14 billion lightyears away from us!
And if then considering that the further away we look, the more we look back in time and do not see present, but past - in 14 billion lightyears distance we see it how things looked 14 billion years ago, but we still do so by staying in our present - then it really becomes mindbogging and one looses interest to think in words anymore, isn't it like this? At least that's how it is for me.
And maybe in that moment something happens indeed, that something like a cycle gets completed, when the space in the atoms and the space in the universe finally return back to the witness perceiving these dimensions and link up again with the inner space that is this witness' mind reflecting over it. The space "out there" and the inner space in us - maybe the only difference between it is our thought, to use an analogy: like the surface of a bubble is the only thing that separates it's inner void from the outer void in which it floats.
It's all just a dream within a dream within a dream. Mind dancing with it's own imaginations. Can one dare to imagine that maybe "exploration of space" also is "exploration of mind", and that "exploration of mind" means "exploration of space"? I never was able to ignore this intriguing thought.