"Want to take a flight to another galaxy? Like our closest one? Come on guys! We can do it! The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest, and it is 2.5 MILLION light years away from us. Even at the speed of light, getting there and back is unfathomable. What does all this mean? We are stuck here."
Speed of light, baby! That seems to be the big talk in some circles lately. Why? Now that Elon Musk has us on the cusp of visiting other planets, some are thinking more broadly. Like, why can't we go visit out closest star neighbor? That would be Proxima Centauri, a scant 4.2 light years away. Okay - let's go! All we need to do is build a rocket who can travel the speed of light (186,000 miles per SECOND), and we are out of here. But there is a very small problem we need to fix first.
NASA is estimating that once we get out of Earth's orbit and start to travel among the planets, our current rocket technology, using Venus as a gravitational boost, could get us up to 430,000 miles per hour! As impressive as that is, that is only a fraction of the speed of light. Even at the speed of light, a trip to and from Proxima Centauri would take almost nine years. A flight to and from that star using our current technology, would take generations.
Want to take a flight to another galaxy? Like our closest one? Come on guys! We can do it! The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest, and it is 2.5 MILLION light years away from us. Even at the speed of light, getting there and back is unfathomable. What does all this mean? We are stuck here. The good news is we are stuck on probably the best planet within thousands of parsecs or so. The bad news, as I just said, we are stuck here.
How about setting up shop, like an "Earth II" on one of the planets in our Solar System? Have you seen the weather report on our neighboring planets? You can be roasted, frozen, poisoned, or all three. Even Mars, which would be the closest livable planet, is sketchy at best. Looking for an "Earth II" in our Solar System is a loser for sure.
Maybe we were never intended to be space travelers. The Good Lord created all the stars in all the galaxies just for us to view with telescopes which are getting more powerful all the time. One evangelist we went to see, addressed this issue. He said, "God created the heavens for us to marvel at. It is almost like He is saying, do you want to see more? Build a bigger telescope." Amen to that - and that is exactly what we are doing. Building bigger and better telescopes.
But as far as traveling even close to the speed of light, we might have to put that in the "never happen" category. Or leave that up to fictional books, like Tom Swift. That is as close as we will ever get.
No comments:
Post a Comment