The Speed of Life

Usain Bolt is the fastest human on record, with a foot speed of almost 28 mph. The speed of sound is about 770 mph in dry air. The circumference of the earth that we whip about on is about 25,000 miles. An object that wants to leave earth must achieve escape velocity, around 25,000 mph. The speed of light in a vacuum is about 187,000 miles per SECOND. According to relativity, this is the ultimate speed limit of this universe; nothing can actually achieve it, except light.

The sun is 96 million miles from all us, which means that it takes a ray of sunlight about 8 minutes to travel through space to poke you in the eye on the drive home. A light year is actually a measure of distance, it is the distance that light travels in a year, or 5.87849981 × 1012 miles.

Big number, huh?

But not really. In astronomy, distances are measured in parsecs, equal to about 3.25 light-years, kiloparsecs, megaparsecs (1 million parsecs) and gigaparsecs, which represent a billion.

Sounds like a lot of Han Solo talk, right? This is the basic language needed to describe the largest scale structures of our home, this universe - filaments, sheets and walls, formed by patterns in gigantic clusters of BILLIONS OF GALAXIES, which are separated by mind-bogglingly immense voids, creating a web or sponge-like structure...made of stars. We could reverse the process and visit the molecular, atomic and quantum worlds.

I went through all of that as sort of an exercise for all of us to appreciate a few things. The first is the idea that structure and symmetry exist on the most immense scales imaginable – look at some of the images of the galactic superstructures, they are quite beautiful. The second thing it brings to mind is the immensity of this place, this ever expanding universe that we share, and the tremendous capacity for knowledge and understanding we acquire through the instruments and techniques of reason. We should never surrender the capacity for investigation and the right to question traditional explanations.

We have the power to solve our problems.  We have the capacity to understand them and the power to resolve them. Perhaps we can look to our children for the wisdom to not repeat them. But it is up to us to deal with those hostile, nihilistic voices in our global community who do not seek solutions, those who profit from problems and treat our one and only spaceship as their private property, with no regard for progression of ancestors stretching behind us, nor the children waiting to be born.

We all love Star Trek and Star Wars, right? Those incredible programs that used the power of imagination to show us what is possible, to show us ourselves among the stars….

I am telling you that we will never reach the stars until we deal with the less evolved here on Earth.  It is not okay to be hateful or cruel or discriminatory because of outdated superstitious customs or ethnic vendettas. It is not okay to own the earth and let many starve so that a traitorous few may rule. It’s not okay to not evolve, to want to return to the image of a past that never was. It's not okay to pretend corporations are people, or that people are disposable, or that the planet can be replaced.

Let’s proceed, instead, into the future, together…