Gringo : Diary Calendar
Saturday, August 30, 2003
4th Day of the Harvest Moon,
71st Day of Summer
56th Year of the Space Age
71st Day of Summer
56th Year of the Space Age
San, Diego California
Entry #5 by Philip Relmond
Summer will end. More than 11,000 died in France this last Moonth from the heat, mostly elderly left behind in suffocating apartments while the kids and grandkids went off on August vacations.... I am not quite sure I believe this (abandonment issue) or whether "we" are still hurling shit at the French for not supporting "US" in the war that has now killed more U.S. soldiers after the President declared "combat operations" over than died during the "quoteunquote" "real" f i g h t i n g aheam ahumph uhhuh yep viet dyep didimao laidai laidai lay down and die no never not at all it ain't Vietnam, it ain't the Philippines, it ain't Afghanistan nope nope nope it ain't it ain¿t it aintntn nuthin like M e s o p o t a m i a B A B Y L O N nope not that neither
Now for something completely different
When people travel into the stars we will need a map....
The Earth, planets and sun, are moving in the Orion river of stars circling the Galaxy, halfway out from the nucleus. We lean toward the inner side of this arc, facing the galactic center beyond Centaurus and Scorpio, or, looking towards the outer rim past Orion itself. All the stars we can pick out individually with the naked eye are moving with us in this stream, this arc, also called the Orion arm. More distant fields of the Galaxy look like clouds of light behind dark streaks of dust.
Distance between the stars is measured in light years, the distance that a beam of light will cross in one year's time. The nearest star (other than the Sun) is more than four years away. By comparison, our Sun is only eight minutes away by light, and the Moon barely two seconds. Sirius, the brightest night-time star, is seven years away, it is so bright both because it is bigger than our Sun and also so close. But Betelgeuse, the bright red shoulder of Orion the hunter, is almost 425 lights years from us; it looks so bright because that red giant is something like 10,000 times brighter than our Sun. Lucky it is so far away -- especially if it exploded and that light hasn't even got here yet. No joke -- that monster is unstable! If you watch it for days and weeks again and again you will notice it gets brighter and then dimmer -- that happens as it swells up big and bright and then settles back down again out there, four hundred nice long years away from us!
However, even if it is a couple steps down the street, when compared with the rest of the Galaxy, Orion is in our neighborhood. Bidirectional metaphor coming and going. The center of the Galaxy, best seen from our southern hemisphere, is a huge glowing blob roughly 20,000 light years away, with a width of some 25,000 light years. It is obscured by twisting tendrils of dust moving between our spiral arm and the nucleus.
Constellations are the shapes that nearby bright stars seem to take when we look at them with out minds hungry for explanations and stories. These stories of animals and heroes and gods and monsters are told differently in Asia, Europe, Africa and America. Modern science has generally adapted the constallation names from ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian cultures. Orion the great hunter. Leo the ancient lion killed by Hercules. Virgo the mother virgin. The Scorpion. Twins. Fish. Many more -- 88, officialy.
When people travel from Earth to the stars, we will say they are goint toward some particular constellation or star. We will see the travelers return first from the nearer stars, or hear news from them first, simply because it will take less time for messages (or they themselves) to get back to Earth. From stars like Alpha Kent or Sirius, they will come back in ten or twenty years, but they will be only five or ten years older. Stars like Capella or Castor, 45 lightyears or so away, will send back their travelers a hundred years later but they will be only five or ten years older. A traveler who went to the Hyades cluster and only stayed five years, then came back, would return to the Earth 300 years after she left, but only be ten years older.
How is this possible? Why? Because light is an absolute speed limit (at about 300,000 kilometers per second) and, as I have calculated (write philrel@hotmail.com for details) the standard light-acceleration trip will take two years of your time -- one year to speed up and then one year to slow down at one standard Earth gravity of 10 meters per second/squared. Yes. Speed up, one year, cruise at almostttttt the speed of light, then slow down. In between, while you travel up against the wall of lightspeed, time slows down and you cross 5, 10, 50 or a hundred lightyears in relative days or weeks (or longer/slower, for a more secure navigation safety-margin).
Meanwhile, while you travel across enormous distances and unbelievable speed in only a few relativistic hours, all the planets and stars outside continue to revolve and revolve and live out each and every day of their history. Imagine if you left your money in the bank and then came back a hundred years later but you were only five or ten years older. Better bring a really nice gift for all the bank people, eh? Eh.
"They don't abandon towns any more." -- B.
Again I thank NASA for making available this public domain image, and the other two above which have been edited/intervened. You can visit them at The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.
Yeah, this be the place. See the bay? Those greybrown splats on the upper left are the dead volcanoes. On the right and dead center you can see the main river. The city was built just above it, on the eastern shore of the bay. You can also perhaps imagine/see how it washed everything away in the damburst of 1918, when my greatgreatgrandfather and his son my greatgrandfather finally reconciled in time to destroy everything they had built, in order to wipe out the fire that had burned the city and wash away the bandits who were busy sacking its last remnants amidst flame and smoke....
Next diary entry... Danial potpouri.