It's insane how we exist, used to our environment on earth....where everything has a comparable distance...size.... how we exist for a certain amount of time...in such a small temperature range....
and how those ranges are but the tiniest slice of the scale.
The universe exists at a scale that isn't even comprehensible to us. Hundreds of billions of lightyears across... and who knows, maybe it goes on for infinity. But once you leave the realm of Earth, and start to look at the realms of our solar system...our galaxy....our universe... the scale of everything changes....Distances increase beyond comprehension...temperatures increase and decrease to levels we've never even come close to witnessing/experiencing (not that we could), that time itself can be understood totally differently. It's insane to me that we can look up at the sky at night, and literally see something as it was millions of years ago. We're not seeing a movie of it, we're literally seeing it...As if we were sitting on the moon, looking at Earth with all the dinosaurs walking around.
It's insane how it's such a different realm than we're used to. We're used to interacting with things that are on the scale of our daily lives on earth. Scales out in space are so vastly different, that it's beyond human comprehension.
I just got back from observing 5 shooting stars (I'll call them meteorites from now on). As I looked up and saw the white streak shoot across the sky, I couldn't help but wonder...
If I could slow down time, and float next to the meteorite when it burned up (by hitting our atmosphere), what would it look like?
Did anyone else on the Earth see it in that moment, or was it just me?
How fast was it going?
How far away did it come from?
How long was it floating through the vastness of space, before it came across the influence of Earths gravity, burned up, and ended its long journey here?
If it had somehow not gotten sucked in by Earth's gravity, where would the meteorite have ended up?
How was it formed? Was it a chunk of another planet? of a star? of a larger comet?
What noise did it make when it hits the earths atmosphere?
Before it disappeared, what did it look like? how much did it weigh? what would it look like under a microscope?
These were the questions I was asking myself tonight (and MANY MANY more) as I watched the documentary "How the Universe Works", sitting on my back porch at night.
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