As I get older, I am becoming increasingly more fascinated by planet earth, our galaxy, the universe, together with our truly and absolute insignificance within it all. This morning while sitting in a quiet corner of the LaHave Islands, my thoughts went back to something I read recently about light and distance …
A radio message travels at the speed of light, nothing will
ever carry a message faster than the 186,282 miles per second, or for you metric
kids 299,792Km/s.
Sending a message to Mars when it is at the furthest
distance from earth, will take about 20 minutes to get there. I suppose that is
why nobody drives a Mars Rover with a joystick. If they did, then by the time they
saw the big rock in front, the Rover will already have hit it.
Voyager 1 has been leaving since before most people alive
were born, it is the farthest that anything of ours has gone. A radio message
sent now would take a day to reach it, and another day to hear back, a two day
conversation.
The next star outside our solar system is over four years
away at the speed of light, if you were to ask it question, the answer will
come back in eight years. If someone was sitting on that star, they would see
us walking around in September 2022.
Our galaxy is so wide, a message sent from one edge to the
other would take 100,000 years to arrive, which is 20 times more than the whole
of recorded history. The universe is bigger than that, so much bigger that
light has been crossing it almost from the beginning, and nightly it is still
arriving into our eyes as we stare into space. That light is “old light”, meaning
we are constantly looking into the past …
It was a beautiful bright and still morning to contemplate
all this, while sitting on my favourite LaHave Island Rock. The light that was
used to take the following photos, started its journey from the sun just over
eight minutes beforehand ~ old light.
After this, I went off to the LaHave Island Wharf, before a wander on Rissers Beach, where
the old light was still shining brightly …
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