Dawn Patrol 5.9.25
Scientific American really messes with you mind sometimes:
Thirty Earths could fit into the distance between our planet and the moon.
It would take 170 years to drive to the sun from Earth on an imaginary highway.
Pluto is 30 times farther; it took the New Horizons spacecraft more than nine years to get there, traveling at 31,000 mph.
The distance light can travel in a year is called a light-year, and is about 10 trillion kilometers.
The nearest star system to the sun is Alpha Centauri, which is 41 trillion km away (about four light-years).
The universe is expanding ever faster and might be 90 or so billion light-years across!
There's this cruel trick we're all a victim to. Here I am, I'm sitting here talking to you. The undulations of the universe have somehow given me this ability to perceive things. I know how far away things are and what they are. But there's this curse that comes along with it. You can be aware of the moon and the sun and the stars and alpha centauri. But you'll never see it all. You'll never know it all. And that sometimes makes me feel like, would I rather not be aware of it? Would I rather have that reductive world-view of the Vikings who think we all just live in a big tree or whatever?
What is the infinite universe telling us? Is it beckoning us? Is it saying "hey, you there, sitting in your dining room at four in the morning, talking into a microphone, come and meet me."...
Or is it a warning?
Here be dragons.
Jorge Borges wrote a story once called "The Book of Sand". A man discovers a book in an unknown language, full of mysterious symbols. He sets himself to the task of learning the language and decoding the symbols. He slowly realizes that the book has no end... that no matter how many pages he turns, he never gets to the end. He's obsessed with the knowledge trapped in the book, but the book has no end, he'll never know it all. But the knowledge in the book is so alluring, he can't seem to stop himself.
At one point he decides the only option is to destroy the book. But then he realizes that if he tries to burn the book, and the book has infinite pages, that it would continue to burn forever and would eventually fill the entire planet with smoke.
So he does the only thing he can do: he makes it somebody else's problem and hides the book in little corner of the Argentine National Library.
Borges seems to feel that the only way to deal with infinity is to turn away from it. Because it will suck you in.
But when you turn away from one thing, it means your facing another. So I have to choose now what I face when I turn away from the infinite universe.
And I suppose that's you. This microphone. A much more manageable infinity.