The Tin Whistle Menagerie

Maybe it’s working at home has got me feeling a little loopy.  Or maybe it’s that it allows me to watch 19 hours of the Science Channel every day.  Either way, I’ve been thinking about space, and life in other  places, and the galaxy, and the universe, and the planets, and all this stuff.  This might read like a rant, but… 

How do we really know what our galaxy looks like?  I mean…  we don’t, it’s all theoretical, but even still.  It’s like if you’re born in a hospital, and you know this one room where you were born on, and you’re trying to figure out what the rest of the hospital looks like, from the outside.  I don’t know what you’d imagine the rest of your little world to look like, at that point, but my guess is that whatever notion you come up with is probably a gross inaccuracy.  Right?  I mean, how can you know?  

Recently, I heard this thing about the Milky Way being a hungry galaxy.  Andromeda, our assumed neighbor galaxy, is starting to get eaten up by the Milky Way galaxy.  It happens when the gravity from the two massive bodies attract the galaxies to one another.  As they get closer to each other, they start to occupy the same space and merge into one galaxy.  I don’t know how you really know which galaxy ‘wins,’ so to speak, but one would essentially consume the other.  

At the core of every galaxy is a Supermassive Black Hole.  A black hole is formed when a star fades out and dies.  Now that is a hell of a funeral.  The star dies, and billions of other stars congregate around it, orbiting, living, existing, breathing.  And the ironic thing is, the supermassive BLACK hole is what makes the center of galaxies so bright–we don’t see the black hole, we just see the light and stars and everything being sucked into the middle.  

Then, there’s the unexplained phenomenon of the planets close to us.  If you don’t know, there is a hexagonal storm that has been raging on Saturn for as long as we’ve had close enough footage of the planet to see it.  For all we know, this could date back billions of years.  Likewise, there is ‘the eye’ on Jupiter, another storm that has been in existence for as long as the planet has, for all we know.   The fact that Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune are all gaseous, alone, is kind of baffling, as it’s so cold on Saturn’s moon Titan that methane exists in a liquid form.  What kind of sup-zero gases really make up these planets, that it remains a gaseous state?  At what point would any of that freeze and become solid, or even liquid vapor?  

So enough with the ranting already.  I have a theory about life in the universe.  Other life, that is, to be sure.  I’m sure all you astrophysicists out there already know the deal with the space-time and the like, but let me break it down real quick.  Basically, time is completely open to perception, and man’s perception of time on Earth is different than it would be if man were traveling at the speed of light (that’s the big one).  Likewise, Earth itself interferes with the space-time continuum and distorts it.  Our time on Earth is relative to being on Earth.  

With this accepted, my assumption is that we don’t need to conduct our travels in light years, as far as exploring the universe goes.  We let our own perception of time distort the reality of space, which is that everything takes on its own relative time.  My theory is that once you are far away from the atmosphere, time slows down to some degree.  You don’t ‘feel’ this slow-down, it just happens and you continue to exist in a new environment with new rules.  Allow me to offer an example (to those of you entertained enough to still be reading at this point); We sent the Cassini space probe to do research of Saturn.  It has done marvelous research and I commend it for that, but hear me out here…   The trip from Earth to Saturn was somewhere in the realm of 12 years.  To me, that’s 12 Earth years.  I do not think that it actually took the Cassini that long from its own perspective, but from us onlookers here on Earth, that’s what it took.  

Taking that further…    if we can devise a craft that could remain in constant propulsion, we could set our sights on any point in the galaxy and reach it.  Here on Earth, we would assume that the mission was a failure and start drawing up new equations, but from the perspective of being a human on the ship, with its own space-time relation, you’d be able to make it there.  

While this ship is en route to its destination, time in other places goes on in its own relative manner.  Just as on Earth, intelligent life could develop in any place with the right conditions.  While this can take billions of years in relative time, if you are a space traveler on your way to a planet with optimal life conditions, the life could develop on that planet, to some degree, in the time that you spent getting there.  Now let’s say this whole mission takes you a relative time of 20 years, and you make your return to Earth…   well, when you get there, an non-proportional amount of time would have passed on Earth.  Essentially, once you create your own relative time, you’ll have forever lost the relative time of your past.  Even if you get back to Earth and once again are on Earth Relative Time, you’ll have distorted your position within that time.  The only way to measure your progress would be from a space station that shares the same relative time as you.  

So that’s my recent theory.  Maybe it’s been too much Science Channel.  Maybe I’m too big on the Twilight Zone.  But maybe–just maybe–I’m right.