Hello? A Cosmic Perspective
by Harry Palmer
From Volume 2, Issue 1 - Jan/Feb 1996
On the Wizard's course, students often join table groups to discuss or explore conscious
phenomena. The following article by Harry is grist for a table group discussion.
Sometimes there appears to be a veil on consciousness that keeps us unaware of
the universe or prevents us from taking a cosmic perspective. Perhaps it is some alien
indoctrination, or perhaps a protective screen erected by our own egos, or ... No matter,
penetrating the veil almost always causes a restructuring both of consciousness and our
sense of self (as many astronauts, astronomers, gurus and science-fiction writers have
discovered).
Light travels at approximately 186,000 mile per second. That means that a photon of light
could travel around the Earth seven times in one second. There are over 31.5 million
seconds in a year. If you measure out 31.5 million lengths of 186,000 miles each and lay
them end to end, you'll have the distance that light travels in one year. It's almost six
trillion (that's
6,000 billions) miles. That distance is called a light-year.
If you traveled at the speed of light, you'd leave our solar system in about 5 1/2 hours.
You'll find yourself well into interstellar space. Now you are encircled by an irregular
ribbon of stars called the Milky Way Galaxy. You're in it. Get used to the view, because
even at the speed of light, the scenery is not going to change much (the closest neighbor
to our solar system is the star Alpha Centuri, something over four light-years away).
The sun, at the center of our solar system that you leave behind, shrinks to a point of
light and is lost in the stars, and there are a lot of stars! If you started counting
stars at the rate of 100 per minute, it would take you 2000 years to arrive at the 105
billion or so total that comprise our galaxy. Some astronomers estimate that as high as
50% of these stars may have orbiting planets, with possibly 2% or more of the planets
capable of sustaining life, that's over a billion inhabitable planets.
And is there ever a lot of empty space! Conceptually unfathomable. Endless. Even within
the galaxy. The galaxy you are in is shaped like a flattened spiral with four arms that
curve counterclockwise (when viewed from above, whichever way that is). The spiral is 600
thousand trillion miles across- 100,000 light-years-and 60 to 100 thousand trillion miles
thick.
Earth is the third planet from the sun, in a solar system the size of a pinhead, lying in
the center of one of the arms about half-way between the central hub and the edge of the
galaxy.
Now is a good time to take a bearing. At the speed of light, if you steer into the
brightest area of the encircling star ribbon, it will take you about 25,000 years to reach
the galactic hub-downtown Milky Way. If you steer in the direction of the faintest area of
the ribbon, you'll reach the galactic rim in about the same amount of time. If you steer
perpendicular to the
ribbon of stars, you'll depart the galaxy in just 5,000 or so years.
Now if you thought interstellar space was large, wait until you see intergalactic space.
Once beyond the Milky Way, you will see there are other galaxies in the neighborhood, some
as close as 170,000 light years. Two smaller neighbors, probably containing less than 15
billion
stars each, are called the Magellanic clouds. They are irregularly shaped and are still
forming stars–or at least they were 170,000 years ago when the events now reaching
you occurred there.
And there are some more distant neighbors. The Andromeda galaxy (M31), is about 2.2
million light years away. It is twice the size of the Milky Way and contains an estimated
250 billion stars.
Keep going and you'll see the giant elliptical galaxy, M87, (plus or minus 750-1000
billion stars) and the barred spiral galaxy, NGC 1365 and another spiral galaxy, NGC 2997.
Galaxies are given numbers by astronomers because they are too numerous to name. How many?
No one knows, but they are far more numerous than the stars in the Milky Way. Even
counting galaxies at 100 per minute, life on Earth has not existed long enough to count
them all!
Galaxies exists in groups called island universes. The local island universe contains
about 30 galaxies with a total of about 10 trillion stars. Somewhere out around 50 million
light-years, you'll leave this island universe and enter a really, really big space. In
this space you're
surrounded by more island universes than are countable. On the average, island universes
are at least a million times further apart than galaxies.
Do you know what's really interesting? Nothing I'm telling you is fiction.
Hang out for a few minutes conceiving from this cosmic perspective, and
see what effect it has on your consciousness.
Which leads us directly to this issue's Global Thoughtstorm: What effect does familiarity
with the universe have on your consciousness?
