The Wild Blue Yonder Page #3

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you don't have a sun

you don't have a sunrise anymore

there's nothing you can look at and see

other than points of light.

There's no sense of being

close to anything.

So you are truly an island.

You begin to accept

the different life.

Frankly speaking, my hunch is they

believed it wouldn't be that far.

Because if you could go to sleep, wake up on

a sleeper train pulling into your destination the next morning.

I could've told them.

I know all about it.

We travelled all the way from

the outer reaches of the

Andromeda Galaxy.

Do you have any clue of how far that is?

No you don't.

Let's get this clear from the start.

The closest star to this planet,

or should I say speck of dust,

is only 4.5 light years from here.

And may I say that Alpha Centauri is

a couple of million degrees hot

which, i don't want to exaggerate, could be unpleasant.

Now, how fast is the speed of light?

Using conventional fuel,

l mean rocket fuel

to accelerate to 30% of

the speed of light wouldn't take

all the fuel tanks on the planet Earth, that are

equivalent to, say, the Rocky Mountains.

It would take all the mass in

the Universe visible to the naked eye.

That's the Earth, the Sun, the Solar system

the Milky way, all the stars in your galaxy,

all the stars in the surrounding galaxies.

Now, how fast have you gone so far?

Fastest speed acheived to day was by

your Voyager space probe, which accelerated to

about 55 000 miles per hour and is

currently heading our of your solar system

into deep space. Now...

let's suppose, that that is a spaceship,

you are an astronaut

on that ship and you are headed

towards Alpha Centauri, which, I remind you

is 4.5 light years from here.

Now, let's assume you started your

voyage 20 thousand years ago

this is the time of cromagnon man,

paleolithicum, cavepainting

in the south of France. You're hunting

bison, rhino, wooly mamooths.

And you're speeding along at 50 000 miles per hour

for another ten thousand years.

Now you're in neolithicum, mankind

begines agriculture, domesticating animals

sheep, goats, horses, pigs...

Now, when I say pigs, i mean

breeding domesticated pigs.

This was mankind's first heart sin. Why?

Because in order to breed animals you have to become

sedentary, this begats settlements, which begat towns

which begat cities, which begat all the

problems that will be mankind's destruction.

Breeding dogs is not a sin because they all

go with you on your nomadic hunts.

But pigs, that was the sin.

I've diverted.

The ship continues on it's way for another

6000 years. Ancient Egypt, pharaohs, pyramids

few thousand years more

past ancient Greece, ancient Rome

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