Mind Boggingly Big
Entry posted by caldrail
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This morning was wet. Not heavy rain, but that persistent drizzle that dampens everything. Quite a change from the cloudless sky I saw last night. Most of us star gaze once in a while, and that's exactly what I did from the back window of my home. Sadly, the atmospheric conditions and the glow of street lighting meant you could only see the brighter stars. The night sky is sometimes so much more vivid in the countryside. But there was the Big Dipper, probably the only constellation I recognise.
I find it hard to take in what those tiny points of light actually are. Each a massive nuclear furnace that dwarfs the earth, and the nearest a whopping twenty five triillion miles away. At a steady pace, it would take me something like nine hundred and sixty million years to walk there. Even if I drive in a Ferrari flat out, it would still take sixteen million years. A transatlantic jumbo jet takes four million years. The fastest car ever, Thrust SSC, won't be there any sooner than two million years from now. An Saturn V moon rocket at full throttle will still need more than eighty thousand years to cover that distance.
You know what? Douglas Adams was right. Space really is mind-boggingly big. This means of course that if space aliens really are visiting earth on a regular basis as is often claimed, they're certainly paying less fuel tax than we are.
Big Car of the Week
Is it my imagination or are 4x4's getting bigger? One enormous black vehicle turned a corner in front of me today. I can see why americans class them as trucks, this one surely required a heavy goods vehicle license to be legally driven. Vehicles like that might be okay on the american highway, but in the British west countrys somewhat restricted lanes, it looked ridiculous. Still, you can't argue with sales. Bigger is better in many peoples minds. If it carries on like this, we'll need to drop a mountain-sized meteorite off the coast of Mexico to render them extinct.
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