We’ve (literally) never been here before….

This twenty-minute video spends a lot of time talking about… time. It’s only at the end that it arrives at the punchline, which is to demonstrate how each and every one of us is travelling at approximately 2.1 million kilometres per hour towards the constellations of Leo and Virgo.

This started me thinking….

Douglas Adams taught me that:

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

Since its formation four and a half billion years ago, the Earth has been moving through space. It’s covered one helluva lot of distance in that time. Homo sapiens (us) arrived on Spaceship Earth around three hundred thousand years ago. Since then, we’ve come a long, long way… but that, as Douglas Adams pointed out, is just a walk in the park.

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee….

In the last few hundred years, we’ve started to understand more about the Universe around us. Compared with the immense distance that the Earth has travelled, our recent movement, the time during which we’ve been actively looking outward into space, is the proverbial peanuts.

The Universe is vast. We haven’t encountered very much of it, yet. We look outwards using technology that gets better and better by the year, but even so, we still can’t determine much in the way of detail.

Suppose… just suppose that the Universe isn’t (as we currently assume) the same everywhere. Perhaps, just perhaps, there are vast regions of space that aren’t vacuum. Maybe things live in those regions. Giant space spiders, maybe. And we’re headed straight for them….

Perhaps there’s a reason that so many people have arachnophobia.

I’m off to bed. Pleasant dreams!