Thoughts for a starry night

EARTHFUTURE

GUY DAUNCEY

One of the glorious things about being away from the city is the chance to gaze at the stars, and won - der. The universe is large, but how large? If Earth were the size of a pea, Sirius, the closest major star, would be 21,000 miles away. That’s an awful lot of space.

Since the distances are so vast, we measure them in light years, the distance light travels in a year. That’s nine trillion kilometres, or 343 bil - lion marathons, if you were thinking of running it.

Sirius is 2,950 billion marathons away. If the running gets tiring, you might want to hide inside a flashlight and travel with the beam as it rushes through space. It would take you 8.6 years to get there, travelling at just over a billion kilometres an hour, 16,000 times faster than Voyager, Earth’s fastest spaceship.

Travelling at the speed of light, you’d be subject to “time dilation,” w h e r e b y t i m e slows down as you speed up, so a fivehour trip would take just two min - utes in personal time. You could travel to Sirius in 20 days, spend a week there, and return in 20 days. Back on Earth, life would have advanced by 17 years, so it might be a good way to pass a long jail sentence.

That’s just one star. What about the rest of the Milky Way galaxy? Astron - omers reckon it contains between 100 billion and 400 billion stars.

Now for the big question. Is there anyone out there? After making allowance for all factors, astronomers reckon that the conditions for civili - zations to exist in our galaxy are pres - ent on millions of planets.

And that’s just our galaxy. The staff at the Hubble space telescope reckons there are some 125 billion galaxies in the universe. In each galaxy, there could be millions of civilizations.

So even if you found a way to zip around using wormholes, as Jodie Foster did in Carl Sagan’s movie Con - tact, you might find yourself think - ing, “So many planets, so little time!” That there are so many galaxies with the potential for so many civilizations in so much space is mind-boggling.

But now think back to a dark and starry night 10 million years ago when our ancestors were primates in the forests of Africa gazing at the moon. For them to imagine that their offspring would one day travel to the moon would also have been mindboggling.

Earth will still exist 10 million years in the future. I’m willing to stick my neck out and say that humans will exist too, if we can get through this rather tricky phase of our cultural evolution.

Our bodies will be just as they are today, since we are no longer dying off before we breed in large enough num - bers, on a persistent enough basis, for evolution to occur. But our conscious - ness, our science and our spiritual awareness will be so far advanced that we can’t begin to conceive what that future might offer, any more than a fifth century Celt in Ireland could have conceived of surfing the Internet.

But first we have to get through our present planetary crisis. It is only 40 years since we first saw our planet from space and felt our consciousness shift to a global identity. We are the first genera - tion in history that has started to think and act globally, rather than locally or nationally.

As soon as we work together as one planet, we will be able to solve our various problems – global warming, dying oceans, forest destruction and warfare – and open the doors to the next stage of our evo - lution. Our generation’s task is to solve these problems so that future genera - tions will be able once more to dream of incredible things.

We really are at a huge civiliza - tional crossroads. If we succeed, the future will be ours in which to dance. And how can we best solve our prob - lems? By focusing our attention on the vision of success, not on the fear of failure. We need to know, deep down, that we can do this.

We’ve come a long way; there’s no need to hesitate now.

Guy Dauncey is author of Earth - future: Stories From a Sustainable World (New Society Publishers) and other titles. He lives in Victoria. (www.earthfuture.com) Correction We apologize for printing the incorrect version of Guy Dauncey’s column Earthfuture in our September 2006 edition: 1) “The projects still have to go through the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency ...” Correction: “The projects still have to go through environmental assessment ...” 2) “... they’ll be allowed to produce 92 more times pollution than the gas-fired Sumas 2 project ...” Correction: “... they will produce far, far more air pollution than the gas-fired Sumas 2 project ...” The staff at the Hubble space telescope reckons there are some 125 billion galaxies in the universe. In each galaxy, there could be millions of civilizations.