When I recently listened to Stephen Hawking’s book Brief Answers To The Big Questions, it made me think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, so I then listened to that book and will re-watch the movie soon. Science fiction is one of my favorites genres, and I was not disappointed. And even though I can’t remember the movie fully, I could tell there are differences, as is typical. It’s interesting that in the introduction Arthur C. Clarke himself shares that the book and movie were created concurrently.
Listening to both books got me thinking about how far away the closest stars and their planets are and how it’s very unlikely in my lifetime that humans will be able to travel outside of our solar system or that we will discover extraterrestrial life. Who knows for sure. No doubt I’m not alone in wishing to know and see more of this incomprehensibly vast universe. I love the awe of looking up at the stars at night.
So I then looked up what man-made object is furthest from the earth. Turns out it is Voyager 1 which has traveled over 14 billion miles from here since it was launched in 1977, traveling at almost 38,000 miles per hour. Astounding! The Nasa Jet Propulsion Lab has a great website showing the current location of many spacecraft, modeled in 3D, and flying through space, all in a really nice full-screen interface.
It seems for now I will have to just settle for books and movies and my imagination to take me beyond what’s known and seen. Do you ever think about what’s out there?
“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.
Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.”
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