Saturday, March 04, 2006

Forever

Ever pondered the concept of forever? I mean, really thought about it. It's difficult to wrap your mind around, isn't it? Everything we know about is finite: we finish a race, we complete projects, our pets die, we die. You can take off in any direction on our planet and eventually get right back where you started. Your journey ends.

But cast your eyes to the heavens on any clear night and realize that you could travel as far as you want and never reach the end of the line. Even trips to stopping points in your galactic adventure would take what we finite creatures consider enternities. If you started at one end of our galaxy - the Milky Way - and you could travel as fast as light, 100,000 years would elapse before you reached the other end. Then it would be on to the next galaxy, Andromeda. Of course, you'd have to allow another 2.9 million years at the speed of light before you got there, so be sure to fuel up and let the kids go to the bathroom first. You could skip along the universe hopping from one galaxy to another without ever reaching the point where you began your journey. Forever. Not finite, not ending. Forever.

To ponder this beyond what you see when you look up, check out the Hubble site when you get a chance. Lots of amazing photos of the world beyond our own. One in particular, of the Tadpole Galaxy, I set as the background on my computer. In that photo, at least a dozen other galaxies are visible. And that's just a very small section of a very large space. We have no idea how many galaxies could be out there. We could not even estimate because the universe expands forever.

Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn't it? Some would probably contemplate the concept of forever and the immensity of the universe thinking it makes them small and insignificant in the scheme of things. But when I take a look at the heavens above I think that, with all the stuff God has to worry about, He still has time for me.

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