Sunday, September 22, 2002
Our Place in the Universe
As a very amateur astronomer it's often humbling staring up at the night sky and contemplating where this planet sits in the enormity of space. On any given night, take a step out the front door and have a look around. All the stars you can see are 1/1000 of 1% of all the stars in our Milky Way galaxy. There are billions of star in our galaxy as there are billions of galaxies in the universe. I read this interesting comparison of a bathroom tissue universe in Sky News. A standard roll of toilet paper is just over 400 sheets. If you let one sheet represent the distance from the earth to the moon, the entire roll is the distance from the earth to our sun. The nearest star to our own is called Proxima, too faint to be seen from earth without a telescope, it's 4.22 light years from here. Let that one sheet now represent 1/100 of a light year with the sun a dot at the beginning of the very first sheet. Pluto would be 5mm along the first sheet, 5mm!!!! The farthest man made object is Voyager 2 which you may have read about in the papers recently, it would be 12mm along and will be at the end of the first sheet in 2181. Proxima, again the nearest star to our own, is at the very end of the roll. That's the nearest star to us, from billions in our galaxy, from billions of billions in the universe. Think about that the next time your otherwise pre-occupied in the bathroom LOL. Anyone who thinks this whole thing was made by some otherwise imaginary being as an experiment with humans at the crux of it, is seriously deluded. As Dennis Miller says that's just my opinion but I could be wrong.
As a very amateur astronomer it's often humbling staring up at the night sky and contemplating where this planet sits in the enormity of space. On any given night, take a step out the front door and have a look around. All the stars you can see are 1/1000 of 1% of all the stars in our Milky Way galaxy. There are billions of star in our galaxy as there are billions of galaxies in the universe. I read this interesting comparison of a bathroom tissue universe in Sky News. A standard roll of toilet paper is just over 400 sheets. If you let one sheet represent the distance from the earth to the moon, the entire roll is the distance from the earth to our sun. The nearest star to our own is called Proxima, too faint to be seen from earth without a telescope, it's 4.22 light years from here. Let that one sheet now represent 1/100 of a light year with the sun a dot at the beginning of the very first sheet. Pluto would be 5mm along the first sheet, 5mm!!!! The farthest man made object is Voyager 2 which you may have read about in the papers recently, it would be 12mm along and will be at the end of the first sheet in 2181. Proxima, again the nearest star to our own, is at the very end of the roll. That's the nearest star to us, from billions in our galaxy, from billions of billions in the universe. Think about that the next time your otherwise pre-occupied in the bathroom LOL. Anyone who thinks this whole thing was made by some otherwise imaginary being as an experiment with humans at the crux of it, is seriously deluded. As Dennis Miller says that's just my opinion but I could be wrong.
