
Late in the quiet of the gecko-roaming hours, a mosquito drones around a motivational poster that says, ‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.’ A picture of a basketball hoop. The mosquito doesn’t know what motivation is. It doesn’t know what basketball is, or what a game is. It doesn’t even know what an image is, or a poster, or a word. Furthermore, it is utterly incapable of ever grasping these concepts or ever coming close to understanding them. It is a very simple creature. It is a mosquito. It bites, it lays, it dies. That is all. It can perhaps see the poster just as well as I can but it can not imagine what meaning it possesses. It can not even wonder.
Outside the air is rich with poor-country foliage and exhaust fumes. The thin moon makes way for several reluctant stars that peer through the darkened haze. I peer back. Those are the stars closest to us, the Solar Neighbourhood. If you shrank the universe down to a scale where the sun had a diameter of 1cm (394 thou), the nearest stars would be a good day’s drive away.
The Solar Neighbourhood is in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy is part of the local group of galaxies. Let’s pause here and reflect: scientists have speculated about the means to travel or send probes to nearby stars. A whole galaxy might perhaps be colonized over millennia. Sending any object to another galaxy, let alone sending a person, would require scarcely imagined technologies. Exceedingly advanced civilizations may have risen, flourished, and perished in those nearby galaxies without us ever knowing. So anyway, those galaxies make up the galaxy cluster, which is part of a supercluster. The visible universe is a Read More
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