by Raymond Gork

Created on: February 11, 2007   Last Updated: May 11, 2007

Space Travel

PREFACE

Two different paragraphs that I chanced to read over the last number of years have intrigued me. I have tried, without too much success, to locate and re-read them. Nevertheless, the gist of what they had to say remains.

The first little essay was the story of a rock, in a land far away. This rock, as the story goes, is 1000 miles long, 1000 miles high, and 1000 miles wide. (The dimensions could have been 100 miles each or kilometers; it doesn't really matter). The story goes on to relate that once, every 1000 years, a little bird alights on the rock and sharpens its beak. When that rock is completely worn away, one day in eternity will have passed.

The second essay concerns our universe. The Sun is a star around which a number of planets revolve. One of those planets is Earth ("The Third Rock from the Sun"). The sun is one of billions of stars in "our" galaxy. Our galaxy, in turn, is one of many billions of galaxies in the universe. As I recall, the essay asks the reader to imagine a train, 100 miles long, comprising many rail-cars, called "hopper-cars", all loaded with fine-grained sand. That train is so long, that if an automobile was stopped at a level-crossing waiting for the train to pass, its occupants would have to wait 100 years for the way to be clear to proceed on their journey. The number of individual grains of sand in that train would be equal to the number of stars. The actual number of individual grains of sand in that "train", expressed mathematically, is impossibly huge likewise the number of stars. It is, for all intents and purposes, infinite.

I have drawn some conclusions from those stories; one being that our Earth is far from unique. Even if the odds are one in many billions of similar conditions being favourable for the existence of another planet like Earth, - and the odds are certainly that that still means, mathematically, there must exist, in the total universe, many billions of Earths, just like ours, and therefore many diverse life- and social-systems, similar to those on Earth.

The other conclusion that I have drawn from the story of the huge rock is the notion of Time. Our notion of time is terrestrial. It relates to the human experience on our Earth. Time is measured by the rotation of this planet about its own axis one rotation equals one day, and the journey around the sun one completed circuit equals one year. Years are divided into months, months into days, days into hours, and so on. Outside of our solar

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