Shells

Let me drop some more perspective on you. Here's our old friend, the Oort Cloud. Picture billions upon billions of icy little comets tumbling around in a vast sphere, such that our entire solar system is enshrouded in a cloud of ice. A shell, like the electron shell.

It's big - extending almost a light year in all directions from the Sun. And then as you see, far closer in, is another sphere, or shell, of icy bodies, but also rocky bodies too - like Pluto. The Kuiper Belt, another shell - also like the electron shell.

So again picture this from far away in space, looking towards the Sun. First a giant cloud of white ice, floating lazily in a vast sphere. And another sphere of ice and rock far within that, and then tucked inside that shell are planets, and a star.

Every star with planets probably has something similar. And so now look up into the dark sky and picture every star you see as a white egg of ice shells, within beats the bright nucleus of a galactic atom. Together these atoms join with vast clouds of gas to create galaxies, and galaxies join other galaxies strung along in necklaces of dark matter, grouping in vast clouds of millions of galaxies, stretching.... forever?

Is a shell forever?

Our Egg

Say hello again to our old friend the Heliosphere. In many ways, you can think of the Heliosphere as the shell of an egg, as it is the wall between us and the cold, uncaring larger universe. The sun is clearly the yolk.

Or, another analogy would be a cell, with the Heliosphere representing the cellular membrane, and the sun as the nucleus.

And then, of course, our entire universe can be thought of as an egg, with an outer wall and a central point of maximum energy (somewhere at some time - the Big Bang). So, in sum, the egg is a slick symbol for everything. And they're tasty, which makes them by far the best metaphor ever.

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....

Voyager Rules!

Not that Voyager, actually. That Voyager had tons of potential and I will admit the first few seasons had their charms. But by the end it was a Space train wreck ending in a Space ditch.
















This Voyager, however, is totally awesome and rules by any measure you'd like to use to measure awesomeness.

I have a huge weakness for pictures like this, pictures of perspective. Like Carl Sagan's "Little Blue Dot", these types of pictures almost force you to consider the reality of your existence. The scale of it all, so vast, so incredibly vast and so incredibly small that our lives are what, in comparison? In the scheme of it all.

I mean, look into this picture. See the little solar system spinning around the bright nucleus of the Sun? Our planet is nothing but a single proton in orbit.

Wiki says:
"For the first ten billion kilometres of its radius, the solar wind travels at over a million kilometres per hour.^[1][2] As it begins to collide with the interstellar medium, it slows to subsonic speeds before finally ceasing altogether. The point where the solar wind becomes subsonic is the termination shock; the point where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance is called the heliopause; the point where the interstellar medium, travelling in the opposite direction, becomes subsonic as it collides with the heliosphere is the bow shock."

This is our cellular membrane, shielding us from the worst of the vast expanse between us and the next cell.

Far out, right?

This makes us what, exactly? Quarks?