Stars. The beautiful twinkling little dots of light out there in the night sky. They amuse all. It always has; since ancient stone age times to 21st century’s space age; mankind has searched for answers in stars. Answers to questions that we haven’t even figured out yet.
But, the really ironic part about stars is, that, what we see is just the past! Stars are lighyears away from earth; infact the nearest star to the solar system, Proxima Centauri itself is about 4 lightyears away from us: which means that when we look at the twinkling light of the star, it was emitted about four years in the past! And the closest galaxy, Andromeda is about 2,50,000 light years away!
So, when we look for answers in the stars, and the universe, we are just seeing what has been happening in the past million light years! While astrologers all over the world claim to predict our future by studying the patterns of stars, they are, infact, trying to predict the future by looking at the past!
So, while the diameter of the universe is roughly accepted to about 78 billion light years, even if there were an intelligent species living somewhere out in outer space, we will not even be able to find it out until the information reaches us!
While light is considered the fastest object/phenomenon in the entire universe, how can we expect some intelligent species, or even ourselves to venture out in space, say at the speed of light, jumping from one star system to another to search for life, within a span of, say some thousand years!
So much as we want to believe we are not alone; and hopefully we aren’t; but, maybe we will be for years to come…
Parth Mistry
