We are so small... Warning (Math & Physics Content)
Posted on :
11-08-07 |
At this moment in time, human beings are able to send robotic craft through space at about 12 miles per second. Not too bad considering my commute to work is 25 miles one way, and it can take me anywhere between 30 minutes on a good day to 2 hours, when it’s raining and Atlanta drivers freak out, to make the drive. If I could get to work in 2 seconds… well, I would sure as hell be better rested.
But my mind wanders.
So at 12 miles per second, it takes about 10 years to travel 4 billion miles (about the distance to Pluto), which means we roughly can hope to travel at about 1/14,686th of the speed of light.
If one day we decided we wanted to travel the diameter of our galaxy, the Milky Way, we could expect to spend about 734,828,468 million years traveling from edge to edge.
Now if we were especially frisky, and we decided we wanted to go to the nearest galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, it happens to be about 35.58 times the diameter of our Milky Way away from us. In layman terms, if we suppose our entire galaxy fits inside a 50 mile diameter, or roughly the size of the greater metro Atlanta area, the nearest cluster of stars would be about 500 miles past San Diego out west somewhere in the pacific ocean.
Meaning it would take us about 26 billion years just to get to our nearest neighbor galaxy.
Now since our best minds are guessing that the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old, that means it would take a space explorer, with a fast ship, and a truck full of Twinkies, almost twice the time the entire Universe has been around to just get to our next door neighbors house.
So if it will take us 26 billion years to get to the next galaxy, and if there are somewhere between 125 – 500 million galaxies it could take someone traveling at the fastest speed we can attain today in space flight at a minimum of about 3,250,000,000,000,000,000 or 3.25 quintillion years to get to the edge of the Universe..
So right now we guess the Earth’s age at 4.55 billion years. The earliest life appeared about 4 billion years ago. 2.5 billion years ago creatures began using oxygen. 550 million years ago brains began to develop. 315 million years ago we crawled out of the oceans. 15 million years ago Human ancestry begins. 1.8 million years ago Homo Erectus evolves in Africa. 195,000 years ago Homo Sapiens emerge. 25,000 years ago Neanderthals die out, leaving Homo sapiens as the only living species of the genus.
120 years ago the Industrial Revolution begins. Humans begin drawing large amounts of power from the 4 billion years of plant and animal waste left buried within the Earth.
10 years ago Al Gore tells the public that we have a Global warming crisis and Humans are destroying the Earth.
Today Al Gore claims he knows how to fix 13.7 billion years of universal evolution with “carbon credits” and that we have only 30 years to reverse our disastrous trends before we can never hope to recover.
I don’t know how to put it more logically.
That any man alive today could claim to understand the complete magnitude of nature, the Earth, the Universe, and planetary evolution in this day and age is frightening to me. That anyone could blindly believe them without more scientific proof and debate just makes me scared for my world.
The world is constantly changing. It’s slow enough so that it doesn’t frighten us. We evolved to enjoy a very slow roll of time and geography. Mountains are not waves throwing us up and down as they rise as fall. Continents move and beach front property changes. 99.999% of all the life that has ever lived on this planet is already extinct.
And we now, because we have T.V., and the Internet, and Wikipedia… because we know more about everything than we’ve ever known before… we feel like because we can think about it, and feel shame, that we should all of a sudden freeze existence. That change should stop. That mussels in Florida should live and that the 4.5 million residents of Atlanta should live without water. That we are not only powerful enough to screw everything up in only 100 years, but fix it all in 30.
The Human race is like the 14-year-old know-it-all that every 30 year old knows is an idiot, and yet we give Al Gore a Nobel prize, and Hillary Clinton might be the President, and the smart investors should be buying future beach front property at a higher elevation. Because the Earth is going to survive, and it’s going to change, and there’s nothing we can do about it except for adapt as best we can to any given situation we may face.
And if this is it… if this is doomsday… if this is the end of life of Earth as we know it… then why aren’t more people coming out for bigger more extravagant parties in an era where we finally can do it right. We’ve got oil. We’ve got electricity. We’ve got sleep number beds. Why not revel in the moment? Why be constantly told to live in fear? Why are we tearing down Buckhead instead of inviting everyone to a huge naked orgy? If this is the pinnacle of Human civilization, why are we wasting it on “carbon credits”?
I’m 34 years old. I could go at 50. I could go at 102. But in the scale of things, I’m a speck of quark on an atom, and if I’m powerful enough to bring this whole thing down… well, then I need a raise. |
