For those of you interested - yes I did cross over to the Dark Side of Blogging by posting an entry title that I know that I couldn't resist clicking on and commenting "Of course it can't! Dear Old George made the whole darn thing up!".

Shame on me, but Mr. Infinite Force put ideas in my head!

But it's not a true "bait and switch" title, because it is a big universe out there.
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Luke Skywalker stood on Tatooine looking at the horizon. He already lived in a world we can only now begin to imagine happening. A world of robots, aliens, starships, hovercars, and rayguns. Still he looked for more. And that's a good thing.

Consider this image: [Cosmic Lightshow]

Every single blip of light in that image is an entire galaxy - the easily seen ones being quite close in cosmic terms and the faintest dots in the background being beyond our best abillities to see clearly. The image was taken in 2003 by the Hubble Space Telescope by focusing on one TINY section of the sky for three months, taking in all the light it could. They chose a section of sky that appeared completely empty to the naked eye so that no stars would drown out the light from things behind them.

A single section of sky. A fragment... Contains countless galaxies.

I'm of the school of thought that with that much stuff there has to be "something alive down there" - hopefully at least as smart as Yoda

Of course most of those possible jawa and wookiee look-alikes (and perhaps an entire society of Harrison Fords) are probably long gone. We started sending radio transmissions in the early 1900's and we had the ability to blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons by the mid 1940's. Entire civilizations could be flaring up into existence and dying into oblivion in this wide-wide universe at a rate exponentially more extreme than our own birth/death rate of individual human beings. How's that for feeling insignificant?

So that's why the creation of SpaceShipOne and more importantly SpaceShipTwo could be the most significant piece of news in a long long time. Named - appropriately enough - the VSS Enterprise after that other "Star" thing. It represents individuals taking an interest - creators putting their financial necks on the line to build it and ticket purchasers spending millions of dollars for a few minutes in space - in reaching beyond this tiny blue dot we live on.

Maybe someday we'll learn the secrets of "Hyperspace" or something similar and be able to break the speed of light and enter a new age of humanity. Or maybe that really is impossible as Einstein theorized and we're stuck at sublight speeds forever. Even if that's true there are 100 odd stars within 20 light years of our little blue rock just begging to be explored. Epsilon Eridani b is one of the hundreds of planets we've detected outside of our own solar system and is only 10.4 light years away from Earth. With our current rockets that would take something on the edge of 35,000 years to reach. A bit out of our reach for now I suppose Nevertheless if you showed someone fifty, thirty, or perhaps even ten years ago what computers would be doing today, they'd be a bit shocked. Who knows what advancements in propulsion we could make in the next few decades?

So what does this little late-night insomniatic philosophical discussion have to do with anything? Nothing for our generations most likely. Anyone reading this now will hopefully see Mars touched by human feet and the moon begin to have permanent outposts placed on it - or even colonized if you're feeling really long-lived (you don't smoke do you?)

So while our own little world is nice: Niagara Falls being one of our most spectacular water shows and Mount Everest being the truest test of human endurance... I look forward to us seeing what's really out there.

I'm done being all deep and melodramatic now. I promise to post something fun next time to make up for it
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