Unimaginable Vastness

I have been reading Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan, and in only the first few chapters he does an incredible job of putting in perspective just how small and insignificant we are. How small and insignificant our wars and quarrels are. How even in relation to just the Earth, we are but "a thin film" covering its surface. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and hundreds of billions of galaxies in our Universe (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 other stars each possibly with multiple planets and each planet with possibly multiple moons).When we look at these other galaxies, we are seeing them as they were (for some) a over billion years ago. That's over 1,000,000,000,000 years. As Sagan states in his book, in relation to the age of the Universe, humans have been around for the last 0.002% of its history.

It is incredible to me to really think about those numbers and what they mean. How can there NOT be at least one other planet out there that has developed life? There is an insane amount of knowledge about the Universe that we don't know even exists. There are places and things out there that no one has or could imagine. There is so much more for us to discover. It is in our nature to want to know more, and find new places and things.

These numbers also make me stop and think, as Sagan has described, just how insignificant our fights and problems are. Look at Earth (the small dot in the rightmost sunbeam) in the picture that Sagan based his book on and think about the words he used to describe it.

                                                    (Image: NASA, Voyager 1)

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." -Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

The Audacity to Dream

50 years ago today President John F. Kennedy gave his famous speech in which he set a goal for the United States to go to the Moon by the end of the decade. This was just four years after NASA was founded. Man first went to space only a little more than a year prior to Kennedy's speech, and yet he knew that the United States could achieve it. The innovation and technological advancements that spurred from the race to the Moon were enormous. With the nation's support, the scientists and engineers at NASA were able to do an incredible thing. They went to the Moon.

"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because the are easy but because they are hard."--John F. Kennedy

Sadly, now it has been almost 40 years since a man has been on the Moon. We have continued to learn and develop new and amazing technologies in space, but our drive to move forward and pursue that which we don't know seems to have dimmed. I know many people who still have that drive, but engineers and scientists aren't enough. The entire country must want it. The more we want to explore and learn in space, the more emphasis our schools will put on it, the more money our government will give to it. So I have one more video title "Audacity to Dream". Let's continue the dreams and the discoveries we were called to do 50 years ago.

"To the Moon and the planets beyond."--John F. Kennedy