Keyword of the Week: Sky Lanterns

The speed of light is about 671 million miles per hour. That's a billion kilometers in 3600 seconds. Probably a little more than that, but it takes a single photon 0.13 seconds to circumnavigate Earth. For comparison, it took Juan Sebastián Elcano and the Victoria almost three years to return to Spain, with Ferdinand Magellan dying in the process. Meanwhile, it would take a fast walker about 950 million years to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth after the Sun. That's roughly 4.25 light-years from this very desk. Give or take.

Granted, I don't know what I'm talking about, but my lack of personal understanding makes me sympathize with our ancestors. Imagine looking up to the firmament and wondering about those unarticulated mysteries. About the sun and the moon. About lanterns in the sky. About northern lights and shooting stars. About getting old, death and rebirth. About the circular nature of existence. Their world kept changing beyond their comprehension and would ultimately give birth to both the modern television and news commentator Bill O'Reilly. Never a miscommunication. Or so he says before becoming some kind a half-forgotten relict of the far distant future. Tide goes in, tide goes out. Alas, a bearded Cro-Magnon nods in agreement while stoking an ancient fire. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I think to myself while stoking a tv-dinner.

Distance seems about as relative as time itself. The first vertebrates left the soup like 370 million years ago. So who knows what we would look like another 370 million years from now, on that fantastic voyage into the unknown. Really, whatever we are, whatever we believe ourselves and to be, it will keep changing. Big, small? A matter of perspective. As whole I think Carl Sagan said it best:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space