Will we leave the sun behind?

The denizens of the sun’s bosom swing hot and fast around their Goddess.

Mercury, a hardboiled egg of iron, lifeless as can be.

Venus, an angry earth, a little too much celestial love 

Has burnt her up into a fiery storm.

Mars feels his mother’s chill and scorn.

In between lies our home, a delicate, beautiful orb.

No perfect creation, 

Just the right mix of this and that for complicated things to happen.

A warm sloshing bath of rock and sea awash with the most complex chemistry,

Some of which can even see!

Some of these eyes look deep into the deepest dark,

Searching for meaning’s heart,

For the signature of a great mind’s work.

What can we see out in the deep, deep, dark?

A trillion lights beyond our grasp.

A billion, billion beaming orbs of light.

Swirling majesties, galaxies of great might.

Arcs of pure light, a million constellations to light up the night.

What though is in our grasp?
Out there in the deep deep dark, waiting for that human spark.

One of the main narratives of our age is that we are destined for the stars, to reach out and grasp the infinite, ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’. The main current focus of our efforts is to explore and possibly colonise Mars. It is a very long way to Mars, a trip of several months spent in what is effectively a large baked bean tin living at constant risk of radiation poisoning before you even try to land on another planet. This is at the limits of current human technology but seems like a feasible possibility.

Whether or not we will ever travel much further than Mars though is another matter. Space generally, even just our own solar system, is far larger than much science fiction would have you believe. Even if people are able to colonise nearby rocky worlds, the outer solar system is as vast as it is icy, where even giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn slip in the void. As distant as these planets are though, the distances to other stars are staggering. For example, ff the entire solar system were modelled on the scale of a football pitch our nearest neighbouring star, Alpha Centauri, would be approximately 5,000 km away!

It seems most likely that faster than light travel will remain the stuff of science fiction and the sheer distances involved travelling between one star and another make it unlikely any civilisation would actually last long enough to travel such vast distances. It would therefore appear unlikely that humanity will leave the sun behind any time soon. This does raise another question, even if other stars are outside of our reach, what is within our grasp?

We will be looking at this in the next post..

Image credited to wikipedia