Thursday, October 27, 2016

I don't remember the exact moment I decided to begin walking, but I do remember deciding to get up on my feet because my knees hurt from crawling. I've covered a lot of territory and left a lot of footprints behind me since then. I muse about this sometimes, and my thoughts go this way . . . let's imagine what would happen if person who rarely sits down averages a humble 3 miles per hour on average for 8 hours a day. In about three years of steady progress that person could walk about 24,000 miles, enough to circumnavigate the earth upon reaching their fourth birthday or so. Magic is applying, of course, from the get go, so not only can our walker keep moving seven days a week but they can also move equally well on water or land. More magic on the way . . . Suppose this child spied with a little eye the moon up in the sky and set off to get there. About 240,000 miles and thirty years later they could put a footprint in the lunar dust, and after another thirty years could arrive back on earth as a sixty year old. That's my life to now, and walking to the moon and back would be quite satisfying. But since we've already suspended the laws of life and physics and are well into fuzzy math let's go on . . . If we set our sights on visiting the sun, somewhere beyond 90,000,000 miles off, we could stroll there in a short 10,000 years. Suppose we get there and, finding our little star interesting enough, decide we want to check out the next nearest star for comparison. Alpha Centauri is around 300,000 times farther away from earth than the sun is. Moving on, we will arive in about 3,000,000,000 years . . . which is a span of time many times greater than the existence of the universe. If I want to see any more stars in my galaxy I'll have to speed up a bit since there are billions of them. And there are billions of galaxies besides this one, at unimaginable distances away. Which gets me thinking . . . in a creation so vast, isn't just about anything possible? Maybe all good things start with baby steps.

2 comments:

  1. Have you been reading "The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy"?
    Sure sounds like it. Your mind goes to strange and wonderful places. Thanks for taking me along. Love, Sis

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  2. One of my favorites! Thanks for tagging along sis.

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