travelling

Several years ago, the army sent me to Australia for a military exercise which lasted 3 weeks or so. The most vivid memory of which i retained was of a couple of nights, in an wide open field, where i laid on top of the canvas of my truck, staring up into the Milky Way in the middle of the chilling night. It is more beautiful than the most amazing fireworks i had ever seen, right above you, passing you by, as the earth beneath my back rotates away.

Several weeks ago, i realized what exactly i was staring at. I had not a clue at all, that i was looking back in time.


The sun is a little over eight light-minutes away from us. One light-minutes equals the distant light travel in one minute, which is 18 million kilometers. That makes the ray of sunlight warming our face on a hot summer day 8 minutes old, after travelling 144 million kilometers through the universe, and the Sun is only one of 400 million other stars in our galaxy called the Milky Way.


Right now at this precise moment as i type, or as you read, someone on a distant star somewhere in the Milky Way looking through a powerful telescope pointed at Austraila could be seeing a silly chap in military uniform laying on the canvas top of a truck staring stupidly at something amazing.

And in the same length of time into the future (from that starry starry night when i was in Australia), i could be looking at the Milky Way through a powerful telescope, and find that very someone looking at the me in Australia in that fateful night.


As the only way to look out into space is to look back in time, to travel thousands of years back into the history of space, to the hundred billion galaxies in the universe, millions of light-years away from our Milky Way.


P.S. paragraphs in italics is with reference to the book: Sophie's World