Special

 It struck me as funny, the day of the eclipse, watching Totality race across the country on TV and looking up at the sliver of Partiality in my own backyard, and I thought how special we must be.  Days before I saw the perfect crescent moon rising before dawn, racing unknowingly to its new-moon rendezvous with the sun in a few days, unaware of its effect on the scurrying humanity below.  All of us looking for a higher universal perspective, human bonding experiences, or something else to do.  This random, light bending confluence seemed inevitable by now, and I was amazed that science could predict its conjugation to within a second, years ahead of time. Two, seemingly independent, celestial objects on their gravitational orbital dance with destiny.  It was special.

Is it a coincidence that the sun is 400 times as big as the moon, but 400 times further away, giving us the perfect eclipse geometry?  I think not. There are no coincidences in nature’s design of the universe. It all has a mathematically balanced plan. There are, in fact, several moons, around dozens of planets, around millions of stars, in billions of galaxies, and that is just in the universe that we know of today. There are, realistically, millions of eclipses going on in the universe at any given moment. In the trillions of places to live out there, the probability that there is Not life on one of them is almost zero. If there is an eclipse happening out there, and there is no one to see it, is it really that special?

We are separated from each other, in this vast universe, by the current Einsteinian limitation that nothing goes faster than the speed of light.  He said that if you stood on a train going the speed of light and shined your flashlight ahead, the light beam would only go the speed of light.   So, we are separated from the rest of the universe by great distances and the speed-limit of light, which is 186,000 miles a second, or 700 million miles an hour, or 6 trillion miles a year.  Wicked fast.

In Star Trek their Warp Speed number is cubed and multiplied by the speed of light to get their actual speed.  So, Warp speed 2 would be 8 times the speed of light or 6 billion miles an hour.  Peak Warp Speed 9.6 is 1900 times the speed of light and that is 12 quadrillion miles per year.   That is tremendously fast but that is science fiction.  We still do not believe that Warp Speed is possible without a theoretical Warp Drive, Worm Hole or Quantum Tunnel taking short cuts through the space-time continuum.    

 According to our current physics, if you stood on the closest star today and looked back at the earth, you would see the light from the Insurrection at the Capital 4 years ago.  If you were on one of our closest galaxies and looked back at the earth, you would see the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.  Light is really fast, but the universe is really big.  And getting bigger.

Even if there is life out there, it could not get here if it wanted to. They are protected from us by our own isolation and the speed-limit of light. Which is good since we would probably beat them up, because they were different from us, or start a war with them because they want our stuff.  Either there is a lot of life out there in the universe that just cannot get here from there, or we are really really really special.  The Garden of Eden. As special as The Dark Side of the Moon or a Total Eclipse of the Sun