I was looking at ‘Picture for Today’ on the Astronomy link (to the left on this page) yesterday and it showed a remarkable picture of galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Now there is nothing remarkable about pictures of galaxies, we have thousands upon thousands of them taken by cameras on terrestrial telescopes but it got me thinking. For most of my life I have been keenly interested in astronomy and have always been awed by the sheer and immense size of the universe. It is something that we, as human beings cannot really grasp. For instance take the size of our solar system. We are positioned in it at a distance of (on average) 93 million miles from it’s centre, the sun. How many of us can envisage even 1 million miles? The distance is huge, even light, travelling at 186,000 miles per second takes more than 8 minutes to reach us from the sun and we are close compared to the planet Pluto which is three and a half Billion miles away! Light from the sun takes hours (we might say light-hours away) to reach there and yet our island solar system is but very small in the scheme of things. The next nearest star is almost four and one third light YEARS away! The next nearest star is only one of hundreds of thousands of stars within our galaxy. The galaxy itself (we call it the Milky Way) is over a HUNDRED THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS IN DIAMETER. Mind boggling isn’t it? Now take that extra step and see that our galaxy is only one of probably millions of galaxies scattered around the visible universe. Their distances, even the closest are measured in millions of light years. The farthest that we can detect are billions upon billions of light years away! Do they still exsist? No doubt many of them do not. We are looking at them as they WERE billions of years ago. They may not be there any longer.
So I was looking at the picture and thinking about just one of those distant galaxies then the individual stars in it and maybe planets circling with life on them, intelligent life? Maybe. the thing is this, if there was life there it has probably all gone now. Here on our little ‘speck of dust’ we think we are something. We are but dust, mere dust in the whole scheme of things. All that we know, all that we are is but a passing second in the endless time of Space. We should be humble knowing that, we should be less arrogant and more loving toward each other. None of us is anything special above our neighbour, we are all in the same boat. Bears thinking about don’t you think?

Shirley Anne