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Our space

Say hello to the Heliosphere, and it's cousin, the Heliopause. You could choose one or the other for this analogy, but this is our egg shell -- our electron wall. Barring the invention of a truly revolutionary technology like Warp Drive, this is our space, and we will not go beyond it for a long time, if ever. In fact, this is our reality, even though we can see far beyond it. And I mean that by a sense of scale; just as the physical reality for an ant would seem very small and contained to us, we are bound by our physical reality, and that is the heliosphere.

The distance between our star and the next is so vast, and space as a whole is so unbelievably vast, that by the simple physics of our surroundings, this is our space. Our cell, our reality. Looks like an egg, right? It's a nice home regardless.

Slightly off-topic, but consider: We live on the earth, which spins at something like 26K MPH; our Earth orbits the sun at a very high speed; our sun orbits a central gravitational spot shared by several other stars; this group in turn orbits an even bigger central gravitational spot, and so on until we all are orbiting the galactic center; but even at this scale we are moving, as galaxies orbit central gravitational spots, and larger collections of galaxies orbit ever larger central gravitational spots, so on and so on until.... well, do the mind puzzle: Not only are we moving incredibly, incredibly fast, right now (as you sit in your seat reading this), but we're also spinning like a whirling dervish.

It's no surprise we often seem so dizzy.

And yes, I'm revisiting the Heliosphere. It's fascinating....

1 comment:

l.e.s.ter said...

“Consider how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck – half of us upside down – by a mysterious attraction to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.” – Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.