What if, or the idea of being able to think a scenario, a situation, or a wish that at this moment is granted to you, what would it be? Let's set aside all the usual worldly "what ifs" because they have all been envisioned already by someone or by everybody. So, forget winning the lottery, or have the ability to predict the stock market, which by the way beats what lotteries may offer by several folds of magnitude. Let's forget all of those because many will tell you, "been there, done that". And we all know where that took the dreamers - you, me and everyone we know. To the proverbial never land.
What would you like then? Well, here's one and it will be no more, no less improbable than those already mentioned, yet likely to make you think more profoundly about you.
What if you were allowed to speed away from here, from where you are right now, but not via some puny luxury bullet train that can go only over 200 miles per hour, nor by a supersonic private jet at a thousand miles per hour? Nor via a space faring rocket 🚀 at 24,000 mph. Those are indeed puny stuff. Right at this moment, perhaps you are sitting down, reading this, and you happen to be somewhere close to the earth's equator (a few of my readers are actually from there), you are already moving at 1,038 miles per hour - which is how fast earth is spinning on its axis at that region of the globe. Which, put another way, is how fast dawn is turning into twilight and how fast it is getting you to tomorrow, and through everyday henceforth. That is also how fast your last birthday is receding away; but then, that is also how fast it is taking you to your next one. In other words, to your being another year older than before.
Now focus on how fast earth is traveling around the sun. You and every inhabitant on this planet are going at a dizzying speed of 67,000 miles per hour around the sun ☀ . Now, you are impressed. Seriously, you shouldn't. According to NASA, our sun travels around the Milky Way Galaxy at a staggering 483,000 miles per hour, or 792,000 kilometres per hour to my European readers, who will be pleased I spelled kilometres "correctly". But the Milky Way is not standing still either. It is hurtling at 2.1 million kilometres per hour towards some place in space. It is going somewhere, although it is merely going as part of a herd of other galactic neighbors, described by astronomers as "the local group". The local group in turn is moving away from other local groups of galaxies near and far at even more staggering speeds. On the other hand, within our "little" local group, our Milky Way and its nearest neighbor, Andromeda, will join in one galactic hug in about four and a half billion years from now. The two will merge into one, but it will be a slow approach to tango, relatively speaking, at just 68 miles per second. But when that time comes, earthlings or any inhabitants of other solar systems in the Milky Way, will be treated to a spectacle of a galaxy of a trillion stars approaching across the heavens. Likewise, inhabitants of Andromeda will get the same view, except they will only see a few hundred billion stars.
Well, since you are allowed to travel with no limits, why settle at those really puny speeds. What if you were to depart from wherever you are right now at the speed of light? Which makes all the numbers I cited above as meaningless as the oozing of a melting asphalt on a hot day to a race car driver whizzing by along the race track. You will depart from your current position at 186,000 miles per second! You can do it because it won't cost you a penny. But you are going to do it differently.
You can look forward and backward, glimpse at your rear view mirror, so to speak. You will not have one physical rear view mirror, of course. In fact, you will not be in a space ship because no object, at least nothing with a mass - not even one droplet of water - will be able to travel at the speed of light. And nothing can outrace it either. It is the ultimate speed limit. But, hey, you are not limited by that because you will travel at the speed of thought. And let no one tell you what speed is that. A journey through or with your mind is without limit. More significantly you will find that inside that 3.5 pound mass of tissue encased within your cranium is one such powerful thing to behold. More on that later.
Let's begin.
After one second had elapsed you are more than halfway to the moon, but by the next second you are past it and the earth will look like the size of a blue beach ball. After nine minutes you've gone past the sun. However, it will not be for another four to seven hours before you get to Pluto, depending on where it was at the moment you left earth.
How far is it to the edge of the solar system? That is the boundary of how far the sun has gravitational control over everything that revolves around it. At this point you are not dealing with distances in miles or kilometres anymore. Astronomers came up with a unit of distance that is equivalent to our distance from the sun and call it "AU" or astronomical unit. One AU is therefore equivalent to about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometres, earth center to sun's center.
What this does is give you a notion of how far things are. From here to the sun is 1.0 AU, or 93 M miles. The edge of the solar system is slightly over 100,000 AU's. It took you just eight minutes to reach the sun, so it would take you 800,000 minutes to reach the edge. Traveling at the speed of light, you will have reached it in about 1-1/2 years.
You are now streaming towards it. There's plenty of time for contemplation as your view looking backwards seems to be serene now, compared to the dizzying recession of everything you passed by earlier. The sun is no longer a dominant blazing source of light. In fact, after just a few moments it is now merely a point source, and all the planets, including earth, are completely invisible, thoroughly swallowed by the blackness of space. A few more moments and the sun is no different from the few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way alone.
There is a universe of stars out there in the entire visible field so that our sun and the entire solar system is but a grain of sand. If all the grains are stars, there are more stars than all the grains in all the beaches around the world. You are thinking: each galaxy has anywhere from a hundred billion to a trillion stars and there could be as many as a trillion galaxies in the entire universe? Distances between them and between stars are no longer measured in AU but in light years. A light year is the distance traveled by light in one year and you are reminded that for every second that elapses it goes for 186,000 miles.
You have time. It will be four years at light speed before you reach sun's nearest neighbor - Alpha Centauri. It will be several thousand years before you get out of your own galaxy, the Milky Way. It will be another two and a half million years before you reach the nearest galactic neighbor. Now, if it's at all possible, you have a notion for how large the universe really is. Speaking of time, it is the least of your worries. Time stands still for you as well as it does for a photon of light. Relative to everything else time did not tick one nanosecond for you.
But that is not the most amazing thing that will impress you. Think.
In that grain of sand that is the solar system is a sub microscopic entity that is a medium size planet that is inhabited by an even more infinitesimally small creature that is one of seven billion other creatures and a host of other living things. That habitat - earth - is a mere one millionth the size of its guardian sun that is but a grain of sand among all the grains of sand in all the beaches around. Now you know where you stand in the hierarchy of significance. But inside you is a 3.5 pound of tissue that is in many ways worthy of more amazement. Just think some more.
That creature that is in a grain of sand in just a few hundred years after it learned to read and write acquired the ability to not only ponder but to actually understand so much about what is going on in all the grains of sand around it. In less than six decades after it built the first airplane, it reached the moon. A mere century after the first flight it has sent a probe to its nearest planet neighbor - Mars. Close up photos of Pluto had been beamed back by one of its inter-planetary probes. Then it discovered that other suns have planets around them, some of the planets are even earth-like. That creature achieved all of these in a blink of an eye in cosmic terms.
Meanwhile, that same creature had composed great melodies, spectacular works of art, poetry and stories and the ability to ponder deeply about its place in the universe.
You represent that creature that is able to rationalize and reason and philosophize over the nature of a world that seems impossible to contemplate. But it is as always a source of wonder that a creature so insignificant as a sub-microscopic part of a grain of sand is able to behold and wonder and go on a quest to understand its place among all the sands in all the beaches and how and why it is able to achieve such a feat. If you still have doubts that all of these were supernaturally endowed to you then there is nothing anywhere in the universe to convince you otherwise. That is because along with that powerful brain 🧠is the ability of free will.
Just remember that during those moments when you think much too highly of yourself think about your place in that grain of sand; on the other hand, when you are stricken by your insignificant place among your peers and the population at large, do not despair because within you that is a mere four to five per cent of your entire body weight resides the ability to know far beyond the limits of the physical world. You can travel at the speed of light without leaving your arm chair while sipping a hot beverage. You are able to engage the power of thought even when all that is physical is no longer attainable. Remember that when even getting up from that chair or when a few steps are a struggle, you can, if you let your mind, travel to the stars and back in time before you take that nap.
You can look forward and backward, glimpse at your rear view mirror, so to speak. You will not have one physical rear view mirror, of course. In fact, you will not be in a space ship because no object, at least nothing with a mass - not even one droplet of water - will be able to travel at the speed of light. And nothing can outrace it either. It is the ultimate speed limit. But, hey, you are not limited by that because you will travel at the speed of thought. And let no one tell you what speed is that. A journey through or with your mind is without limit. More significantly you will find that inside that 3.5 pound mass of tissue encased within your cranium is one such powerful thing to behold. More on that later.
Let's begin.
After one second had elapsed you are more than halfway to the moon, but by the next second you are past it and the earth will look like the size of a blue beach ball. After nine minutes you've gone past the sun. However, it will not be for another four to seven hours before you get to Pluto, depending on where it was at the moment you left earth.
How far is it to the edge of the solar system? That is the boundary of how far the sun has gravitational control over everything that revolves around it. At this point you are not dealing with distances in miles or kilometres anymore. Astronomers came up with a unit of distance that is equivalent to our distance from the sun and call it "AU" or astronomical unit. One AU is therefore equivalent to about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometres, earth center to sun's center.
What this does is give you a notion of how far things are. From here to the sun is 1.0 AU, or 93 M miles. The edge of the solar system is slightly over 100,000 AU's. It took you just eight minutes to reach the sun, so it would take you 800,000 minutes to reach the edge. Traveling at the speed of light, you will have reached it in about 1-1/2 years.
You are now streaming towards it. There's plenty of time for contemplation as your view looking backwards seems to be serene now, compared to the dizzying recession of everything you passed by earlier. The sun is no longer a dominant blazing source of light. In fact, after just a few moments it is now merely a point source, and all the planets, including earth, are completely invisible, thoroughly swallowed by the blackness of space. A few more moments and the sun is no different from the few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way alone.
There is a universe of stars out there in the entire visible field so that our sun and the entire solar system is but a grain of sand. If all the grains are stars, there are more stars than all the grains in all the beaches around the world. You are thinking: each galaxy has anywhere from a hundred billion to a trillion stars and there could be as many as a trillion galaxies in the entire universe? Distances between them and between stars are no longer measured in AU but in light years. A light year is the distance traveled by light in one year and you are reminded that for every second that elapses it goes for 186,000 miles.
You have time. It will be four years at light speed before you reach sun's nearest neighbor - Alpha Centauri. It will be several thousand years before you get out of your own galaxy, the Milky Way. It will be another two and a half million years before you reach the nearest galactic neighbor. Now, if it's at all possible, you have a notion for how large the universe really is. Speaking of time, it is the least of your worries. Time stands still for you as well as it does for a photon of light. Relative to everything else time did not tick one nanosecond for you.
But that is not the most amazing thing that will impress you. Think.
In that grain of sand that is the solar system is a sub microscopic entity that is a medium size planet that is inhabited by an even more infinitesimally small creature that is one of seven billion other creatures and a host of other living things. That habitat - earth - is a mere one millionth the size of its guardian sun that is but a grain of sand among all the grains of sand in all the beaches around. Now you know where you stand in the hierarchy of significance. But inside you is a 3.5 pound of tissue that is in many ways worthy of more amazement. Just think some more.
That creature that is in a grain of sand in just a few hundred years after it learned to read and write acquired the ability to not only ponder but to actually understand so much about what is going on in all the grains of sand around it. In less than six decades after it built the first airplane, it reached the moon. A mere century after the first flight it has sent a probe to its nearest planet neighbor - Mars. Close up photos of Pluto had been beamed back by one of its inter-planetary probes. Then it discovered that other suns have planets around them, some of the planets are even earth-like. That creature achieved all of these in a blink of an eye in cosmic terms.
Meanwhile, that same creature had composed great melodies, spectacular works of art, poetry and stories and the ability to ponder deeply about its place in the universe.
You represent that creature that is able to rationalize and reason and philosophize over the nature of a world that seems impossible to contemplate. But it is as always a source of wonder that a creature so insignificant as a sub-microscopic part of a grain of sand is able to behold and wonder and go on a quest to understand its place among all the sands in all the beaches and how and why it is able to achieve such a feat. If you still have doubts that all of these were supernaturally endowed to you then there is nothing anywhere in the universe to convince you otherwise. That is because along with that powerful brain 🧠is the ability of free will.
Just remember that during those moments when you think much too highly of yourself think about your place in that grain of sand; on the other hand, when you are stricken by your insignificant place among your peers and the population at large, do not despair because within you that is a mere four to five per cent of your entire body weight resides the ability to know far beyond the limits of the physical world. You can travel at the speed of light without leaving your arm chair while sipping a hot beverage. You are able to engage the power of thought even when all that is physical is no longer attainable. Remember that when even getting up from that chair or when a few steps are a struggle, you can, if you let your mind, travel to the stars and back in time before you take that nap.
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