I love star gazing. Love it. Can’t get enough of it. But, I understand maybe 5% of what astronomers talk about. Plus, I have no ability to really use any kind of telescope.
Between trying to comprehend that some stars are at least thousands of light years away – and a light year is like so far away it is ridiculous — and trying to grasp the notion of a black hole — I mean, come on. I can’t concentrate well as it is, and then there’s these folks who talk unemotionally about interstellar space.
Fact is I can drive about 2 hours before I have to turn the driving over to someone else. I drive slowly, average 60 miles per hour on the freeway. Two hours, that is 120 miles, a rather small fraction of one light year.
Do you empathize at all with my dilemma? I love outer space. Love to look up. Look to study it. Love to look at photos from the Mars explorations, and the Hubble telescope, and then some. Love it. Can’t get over it. Read about it. But, I do not understand hardly a thing about any of it.
What is needed, but likely is not happening in my life time, is someone in my immediate family who is a scientist focused on astronomy. We need a Galileo type… someone who grasps the language of folks who spend a material portion of their time looking out, looking up, analyzing data from outer space, who can explain how comets work, how the rotation of the earth comes about, you know, the moons of Jupiter. I need a close family member who can talk to me and help me to understand the cosmos.
So that you know, and I confess: I even have trouble ordering on Amazon.
When I prayed and asked God to bring us someone like Galileo I got the strangest, very deep voiced reply, almost instantaneously: “You’re praying about this? People are dying from a Pandemic, there is social unrest in so many places of the world, folks are losing their businesses, and you think I have time to try to figure out a way for someones related to you to engage in sexual intercourse and then if that is not enough make sure their baby turns out to be a genius scientist? Are you out of your mind sir?”
I didn’t pause, I didn’t flinch — “Look, that’s my prayer. If you can’t pull it off I guess you aren’t all that omnipotent…”
Not sure what to make of it but lately there seems to be a lot of grumbling under ground, and directly under neath my house.