Our planet, the Earth, is the only home we know. Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold. Earth is just right, a heaven for humans. After all, we evolved here. But our congenial climate may be unstable. We are destroying our planet in serious ways. Is there any danger of driving the enviornment of the Earth towards the planetary hell of Venus, or the global ice age of Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows. In our ignorance we continue to push & pull, to pollute the atmosphere & litter the land., oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largly unknown.
Life forms on many worlds may exsist, & by large, of the same atoms we have here, perhaps many of the same molecules, such as protiens & nucleic acids-but put together in unfamiliar ways. Perhaps organisms that float in dense planetary atmospheres will be very much like us in atomic composition, except they might not have bones & might not need calcium. Perhaps elsewhere some solvent other than water is used. Or perhaps there are living things that do not have a solvent system at all-solid-state life where there are electric signals propigating rather than molecules floating about.
Space & time are interwoven. We cannot look out into space without looking back into time. Light travels very fast. But space is very empty, & the stars are far apart. From the Sun to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy is 30,000 light years. From our galaxy to the nearest spiral galaxy M31, is 2,000,000 light years. When the light we see today from M31 left for Earth, there were no humans on our planet, although our ancestors were evolving rapidly into our presant form. The distance from the Earth to the most remote quasars is 8-10 billion light years. We see them today as they were before Earth accumulated, before the Milky Way was formed.
Traveling close to the speed of light you would hardly age at all, but your friends & relatives back home would be aging at the usual rate. When you had returned from your journey, what a difference there would be between you & your friends, where as they may have aged decades, you would have hardly aged at all. Traveling close to the speed of light is kind of an elixir of life. Because time slows down close to the speed of light, special relativity provides us with a means of going to the stars.
The Galaxy is an unexplored continent filled with exotic beings of stellar dimensions. We have made preliminary reconaissance & have encountered some of the inhabitants. A few of them resemble beings we know. Others are the bizzare beyond our most vivid perceptions. But we are at the very beginning of our exploration. Past voyages of discovery suggest that many of the most interesting inhabitants of the galactic continant remain unknown & unanticipated. Not far outside the galaxy there are almost certainly planets, orbiting stars. Such worlds would offer a magnificent view of the Galaxy rising-an enourmous spiral form comprising 400 billion stellar inhabitants, with collapsing gas clouds, condensing planetary systems, luminous supergiants, middle-aged stars, red giants, white dwarfs, planetary nebulae, novae, supernovae, neutron stars & black holes. It would be clear for such a world, as it is beginning to be clear for ours, how our matter, our form & much of our character is determined by the deep connection between life & the Cosmos.
As for me, I want answers, I am on the constant search for truth, when someone tells me the world was created in 7 days, I can't rationalize it. In this day & age those things don't happen, I think that there is a higher power above us, but I couldn't say if it was God, or Buddah, Or Allah, or any of the millions of deities it could be. But I think that, someone with that amount of celestial power could at least give us some clues as to why were here & what our purpose is. It seems to me that life only begins after you die, then you find a meaning to all that you have accomplished. But, If I recall, the Bible says God created the Earth in 7 days, it says nothing about any other planet/galaxy. I think that more often then not, important details are left out for a reason, weather it is to make us wonder, or a conspiracy I cannot say, but the latter is highly likely. So, the adventurers, the wanderers, the intellects that we are, search for the truth in a truthless world....
& I wanna know...why people in today's society(not to make a generalization) are so obssessed with the way people look.
I put my pictures on here, well, because I am a little vain, but I wouldn't base anything on that, in 20 years, I won't have that.
That's why I have a brain! Some people just skip that & think they can be total dumb assess all thier lives & just look pretty in a picture. People can get so much further on thier brain than any physical beauty they may posses. Especially for those who aren't the "beautiful people" anyone can be smart, but it does take effort. I think that's one of the problems I personally have with the present culture, too much pressure to look like barbie & not enough pressure to educate
