Look To The Stars

When I was a child I often went camping out at night, either with my Dad with the whole tent and camp fire thing or sometimes just in the back yard with sleeping bags. But in the great plains, on a clear summer night, you could see the stars quite brilliantly. I live near an ocean now, and such unobscured skies are rare here.

But in those days, if I lay on my back and looked up, it seemed as though the Earth was a giant spaceship and I was in its nose looking out at the stars as we zoomed through space. There were two effects of that imaginary concept:

1. I wondered where we were all going
2. I wondered how long it would take.

Obviously, we are going pretty much nowhere, and we will probably take an eternity to get there. I'm not expecting to be around when that happens.

This doesn't seem very encouraging. The traveling Earth is truly traveling, but we are all just on a big ride around a star that is on a bigger ride around a galaxy that is pretty much traveling out into the even bigger infinity of blackness. Perhaps, in many billions or trillions of years, we will reach some final destination, like whirling into the event horizon of some super giant black hole. Perhaps there is some place nice to go but our galaxy is going the wrong way.

I don't remember when I realized what the Milky Way really was. But it was the actual moment that I realized how vast the Universe must be. That obscure cloudy stream of stars that arched across the sky was our home galaxy, seen from the side, looking toward the center. I also learned about the speed of light, and how long it took for light to reach us from even the closest stars.

Every child starts out fresh. They do not know about these wonders. Each discovers them for themselves, and maybe feels like I felt those summer nights. Each will wonder where are we all going and when will we get there. But the real question that we all eventually wonder is WHY is there anything at all?