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[ Line of Sight ]
DATE: September 11, 2003

Stargazin'

So this week, like lots of other people, I imagine, Sue and I climbed into the car and drove someplace where the streetlights didn't obscure the night sky so we could look at Mars.

Now, as you may know, Mars was closer to Earth this week than it has been in the last 60,000 years. 60,000 years ago, there weren't even people in North America (that we know of), let alone in this little spot south of Seattle, Washington. Kind of mind-boggling.

However, the far reaches of time are nothing, mind-boggling-wise, compared to the far reaches of space. As I looked up at Mars, I scanned the rest of the night sky as well. It reminded me, as it often does, of a line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams:

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

(There's more mind-boggling there, you'll note. I guess if you want your mind-boggled, space is your best bet.)

I've always been one of those people who looks at the stars. A lot. When I was much younger and still living with my parents, I'd come home from a date or being out with my friends and then, before going in, I'd stop. See, I lived in a little town in South Dakota -- outside a little town in South Dakota, actually. We were quite far from city lights, or even street lights. There, right smack in the middle of the continent, you could get a wonderful look at the stars on a clear night, and most nights were clear. As I stood outside my dark house, with everyone inside asleep, I wouldn't let myself go in until I saw a falling star. Sometimes that meant I'd go in quickly, and sometimes I'd be out there for an hour. The falling star always came.

Recently, Sue and I had the pleasure to meet and speak with a guy named Mark Kochte, who works with the Hubble. He was nice enough to give us some great photos. My favorite is of an area of space that they were focusing the telescope on because they were pretty sure there weren't any celestial objects there. What they found, however, were some objects. When they compiled the data, they found that the supposedly empty area of space -- the size of the eye on the head of a dime held at arm's length -- held thousands of galaxies. Each galaxy, of course, holds billions of stars.

Space is big. Really big.

Looking up at Mars this week was fun. Not exciting, not thrilling -- no special effects-laden movie or amazing video game. But it was fun because it was real. It's really up there, and I'm really down here, standing on the surface of my own quickly rotating planet looking up at it. And space really does just keep on going, past Mars, beyond our solar system, beyond our galaxy, beyond the thousands of galaxies we can see. It's not an imaginary place, or the setting for a cool sci-fi movie. It's real. It's stretching out in impossibly, unthinkably far reaches in all directions from you right now as you read this. It's an interesting perspective, I think. One that's hard to keep in your mind for very long.

Now, someone might try to take this perspective and try to prove a point. That we're really small. Or that there must be life out there. Or that we've got to find our proper place in the universe, or whatever. I'm not trying to make any of those points.

All I'm really trying to say is that, just as a journey can be as important as the destination, sometimes the wondering, and the realizing -- the kind you do while stargazing -- is as important as the actual answers, whatever they may be.

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