I often get up early, and part of my typical morning routine is a walk. It’s usually dark when I go outside. The first thing I do is look up.
There, among the searing stars and the bits of flotsam whirling through the universe, is our story.
I don’t know much about astronomy. I could not name most constellations. To me, a planet is a large point of light in a field of stars, which are small points of light.
Yet, out there, beyond the surly bonds of Earth, is our beginning.
My freshman year of college, a friend, who happened to have the key to the observatory, and I would take the telescope for a spin through the solar system. One by one, we’d search out planets – those that were visible – and, between beers, we’d wonder at their station so far away, and yet so close. With a telescope, it looked as though we could reach out and touch Saturn, yet we knew no person could ever travel there.
Distance in space is relative. For example, the moon is a little less than a quarter-million miles from our homestead on Earth. The sun is something like 94 million miles away. Yet that’s just a hop and jump compared to the distances separating us from other stars.
For example, the Proxima Centauri is the closest star to us other than the sun. It’s 4.2 light-years away. Translation: that’s 24 trillion miles. Traveling at the speed of the international space station — 17,500 mph — it would take …. Let’s see, let me just divide this into that, carry the 1, multiply by my shoe size and add the square root of…. Oh, wait, I think my calculator just melted.
Suffice it to say that, barring a breakthrough in interstellar travel, we will never visit even the closest stars.
Except for one thing. We can travel fantastic distances using telescopes. Not the tiny ten-inch mirror telescope I used in college, but the telescopes we have stationed in space, beyond the atmosphere that warps our view. Using devices like the Hubble, James Webb and Euclid telescopes, astronomers can “see” far more than just visible light.
By calculating the red “shift” of light they can even determine how fast and the “direction” those objects are moving. How cool is that?
And they can peer into the past, almost all the way back to the beginning. Of everything. Every atom has its beginning not with humans and not on Earth, but far, far away in a galaxy long, long ago. Maybe. We really don’t have most of the details. Yet.
So when I take that morning walk, I not only see points of light, planets and an occasional satellite passing overhead, I can see our beginning and hints of the trillions – yes, trillions – of galaxies and 200 billion trillion planets that accompany us through a crowded place called the universe.
It is a wondrous, extraordinary experience. All we have to do is look up.
Carl Sampson is a freelance writer and editor. He lives in Stayton.
