Bon Voyager

Bon Voyager

    Astronomer Chet Rayno shows his students a quick view of our Milky Way by pouring a box of salt on the floor and making a pinwheel pattern.  But as he says, "....the scale is all wrong.  If a grain of salt were to accurately represent a typical star, then the separate grains should be thousands of feet apart; a sumerically and dimensionally precise model of the Galaxy would require 10,000 boxes of salt scattered in a flat circle larger than the cross-section of the Earth."

   This is difficult to imagine, isn't it.  A grain of salt, each scattered thousands of feet apart, then add another box of salt, and another box, and another box...10,000 boxes of salt.  But to imagine that each grain of salt represents a star, each of which would easily dwarf our earth.  Put another way, if our entire solar system were placed into the baseball stadium in San Francisco (at that scale, our earth would be the size of a grain of sand), our nearest star --the closest star we could reach once we exited our solar system-- would be somewhere over the Grand Canyon (that star, in case you're wondering, would NOT be Alpha Centauri A & B, but rather Proxima Centauri which some astronomers consider one of the smallest stars;  at this scale, if the earth were still the size of a grain of sand, Proxima Centauri would be the size of a peppercorn).

   Boggling, isn't it?  The distances, the sizes, and yes, the tiny "pale blue dot" that we are as a planet.  This is what Voyager faced, both I and II when they launched in 1977 (in a strange twist, Voyager II was launched ahead of Voyager I).  Two years ago, Voyager I sailed pass our solar system, our first bold venture into interstellar space (for a fascinating overview of the Voyager missions, click on this link: National Geographic).  Carl Sagan, at that time an imaging engineer, had earlier convinced the NASA team to turn one of the satellites around and click a picture of where it had left...earth.  His famous book, and our home, soon become known simply as Pale Blue Dot.

   Said Sagan at the time, "On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.  Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot."  That phrase got our attention.  But what he said later seems even more important today:  "To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

   In a world where news outlets seem to focus on fighting and rebellions, destruction and disasters, it might be wise to rethink what Sagan was trying to say, that life is indeed fragile...there are no guarantees, there is nowhere else to go, and we are indeed treading a fine line to simply stay here.  We should treat it --earth-- and ourselves better.

   Voyager I is traveling at a speed greater than our earth's rotation;  and now, nearly 40 years later, it is just making it out of our solar system (out "there" orbiting speeds increase and other stars will be orbiting at a speed over 10 times that of the Voyagers).  Radio signals from both Voyagers "arrive at a strength of less than one femtowatt, a millionth of a billionth of a watt," according to Smithsonian.  And space is so large, even in our relatively small galaxy, that to "fire a shotgun blast from one edge of its (the Milky Way) disk all the way through to the other, and the odds are not a single pellet will hit a star or a planet."  But even if there IS another planet capable of sustaining us, it is a long, long way away...the Grand Canyon is spectacular but perhaps when you're next there, you might just see it from a different perspective;  and it might just remind you of just how far away our nearest neighbor exists.