Imagining the Universe with Kitty Litter

If you imagine the universe, instead of as what exists beyond the the thin layer of elements that separate us from everything, but as an endless expanse of darkness with droplets of stars floating in determined circles around massive all-consuming, all-absorbing black holes, you'll discover that this is impossible. No matter how hard I know that the universe is thirteen billion years old, that stars are so massive it could take 1100 years to fly around one (a big one) in a jet plane, that millions and billions of these objects inhabit the rest of the dark, vast expanse of everything--in my head the looming rent bill still seems bigger.

When I see this picture-- 

--the biggest thing I can imagine is a dust storm blowing over cities and farms and continents. But this picture represents the birthing process of stars: the Orion Nebula having babies as big as or bigger than our sun, far bigger than our Earth, and incomprehensibly larger than me.

I'm a girl. Sometimes I feel fat. Well. Here's the thing:

Watch this. 

I'm not fat.

I like to imagine the universe. I spend hours and days and months and eventually years trying to picture it, to capture it with words or pictures or simply with thought, but I never will. I also don't care. Despite the immense impossibility of ever understanding the whole thing, it still fills me with wonder (which is a great feeling), reminds me that there's so much more to find and see than the little things that sit in front of me everyday, and it makes even the most mundane seem valuable.

Our magnificent universe, working and working without ever stopping, building and destroying, thinking and innovating; our magnificent universe, functioning in perfect rhythm, ignoring tiny little me who so admires its beauty and grace but still creating the perfect conditions for my existence; our magnificent universe filled with massive stars and planets, made of every element imaginable, filled with black holes and galaxies, life and death and existence, is swirling around itself, dying and breathing and living, and I am lucky enough to be allowed to change the kitty litter.




For more cool things about the size of the universe, check this!

Build Fission Rockets, Become Aliens

Rockets are the key to getting into space. Not the kind of key you keep in your pocket which allows you to access your house, but the kind of key which you keep in a giant laboratory that allows you to access the entire universe. Until now we've only used combustion rockets to do anything--destroy cities, launch missiles, power jet packs, send men to the space station and the moon. But now the anonymous "they" are working on fission powered rockets.

What is special about those? you ask. 

Well, think bigger. Think bigger than Earth, think bigger than Jupiter (my favourite planet), think bigger than our star or our solar system--think deep space. Millions and billions of stars occupy our universe. And dozens of planets orbit those stars--totaling dozens of billions. Imagine that we can fly out into nowhere, soar among the stars.

Whenever I hear someone use that phrase, I always imagine standing among trees or among a crowd of people, except instead of people or trees there are stars. But it will be nothing like that. To soar among the stars is to fly between them with millions of miles between, seeing their glow on the other side of the dark matter that surrounds us, on the other side of the vacuum filled with rocks and dust that sits between our tiny vessel and them. It is to be alone in the dark, always moving forward, always searching.

Sounds lonely. But it also sounds amazing. So what are we waiting for? Let's build those fission rockets and get going. Let's give our scientists jobs. Let's catapult the best and the brightest of the human species out into space to start looking for other places to go, to live, to populate. Instead of waiting for the aliens to come here, let's go be somebody else's aliens.

It's our new mission: build fission rockets, become aliens.

Here is a video in honor of Carl Sagan, one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Enjoy. And go be an alien.

You Never Know What Might End Up In Your Backyard

I like to think about the universe. It's big and dark and full of mysteries. Lots of people think there can't be aliens because we haven't heard from them by now. But what if we are the oldest species in the universe? Somebody had to be first, and they say that our universe isn't very old. And who knows how old universes have to be to have babies? Or maybe we're not babies: maybe we're fleas. Either way we have to expand outwards. If we're babies, we have to grow up. If we're fleas, we have to hop to the next planet over--because that's what fleas do.

Here is a picture of an alien that I drew. It might be smart, it might not be. But I like the horn:

Whether or not aliens are real, there are some very alien-like things right next to you. For example, NASA found an arsenic-based life form out in California. Now we all know some crazy life forms live in California, but up until recently, they were all thought to be carbon-based. This has forced NASA "to redefine the quest for other life in the universe." Or how about this: they recently found a rare mineral, previously thought only to exist in moon rocks, in Australia. Other alien things include bees, dead spiders, coffee, the British, teenager's bedrooms, Obama, and pickled watermelon rinds.

As the oldest species in the universe, we should constantly be on the alert for life, intelligence, and the pursuit of alien beings. In the Milky Way alone there is the possibility of 100 billion Earth-like worlds. Imagine the possibilities--recently, a black hole shot two "cosmic bullets" from it's terrifying depths. No one knows what these are. My guess? Spaceships. Intelligent life from somewhere else in the universe: they've found a way to travel via black holes.

So watch out. You never know what might end up in your back yard.

You Can Stomp On Monsters, But Not On Black Holes. So Don't Try.

If anyone ever tells you there's no such thing as monsters, they're lying. There are monsters all over the place. It's just that we've gotten quite good at ignoring them, banishing them to the outskirts of civilization, or remaining ignorant. Children understand this. When they are afraid of the dark, it's because they know that the biggest, meanest, most dangerous monsters are invisible; and what is the dark but a very commonplace version of invisibility?

 I suppose you want some examples of monsters. That's good, because that's what I was going to tell you next.

Category 1: Monsters We Ignore

You know that guy who cuts you off? Or the one who reads their receipt at the cash register with eight people in line behind them, finds a $1 mistake, and makes the cashier call a manager immediately? Or the lady in front of you who drives 35mph exactly in a 40mph zone, and is going exactly the direction you are? These people are not monsters. But they have little monsters inside their heads. Little monsters that whisper "who are you?" and "why?" and "RAWR" and "you're stupid". These little monsters can have devastating consequences on us. Sometimes they're even contagious. But usually we just ignore them.

The second type in this category are monsters such as The Runny Nose, The Hang Nail, and The Sneeze. These are constantly attacking, but we've developed complex defense systems that allow us to ignore the monsters most of the time.

Category 2: Monsters We Banish

These monsters usually take forms of bears, mountain lions, volcanoes, and poisonous reptiles. Typically we keep them at bay by installing electric lights everywhere, shooting at them if they come to close, or destroying their food sources and habitats. These ones are probably the least dangerous and the most feared.

On the other side of this coin is the Germ. The germ is tiny, but it invades our body and slowly takes out one of our functioning systems at a time. We have developed many defense mechanisms for this one; the main one is banishment through vaccinations.

Category 3: Monsters We Are Ignorant Of

This is a bit of a difficult category, because if we're ignorant, it means we have no knowledge. However, I at least know of one: black holes. You think your teenage brother eats a lot? My little brother would wrack up a $400 grocery bill all on his own when he was thirteen--a black hole would eat the whole planet if it could get its greedy little hands on it. And that would just be the beginning. A black hole would eat our sun as well as all of the surrounding stars. It just sucks in everything, like a giant vacuum--it eats stars, planets, moons, dust, asteroids, entire galaxies. Even you. The worst part is that they'll eat light: mixing your wildest fears into one terrible creature: a giant, ravenous monster that consumes everything, in the dark. Not only would it be consuming you, you wouldn't be able to see it.

So just watch out for little monsters and big monsters, because they're sneaking everywhere, stealing your socks and your hair, making you grumpy and scratching your car, and the only way to fight back is to stomp on them. Except black holes, you can't stomp on those.

The Day the Sun Got Littler

This morning I couldn't see the sun because a dull cover of grey clouds ensconced the chunk of landmass where I live. But there I sat, still contemplating the sun and her magnificent death rays and reading her online dating profile, when I surprised myself by thinking, "well, that's not very big!" To put it in context, consider the two freaking gigantic black holes recently discovered by some astronomers in California. The article states, "Both encompass regions or 'event horizons' about five times the distance from the sun to Pluto." 


So I decided to do some math.


Math can be quite inspiring.


The distance from Pluto to the Sun is 3.67 billion miles*. 3.67 billion miles times 5 is 18.35 billion miles across, a number that is impossible to grasp. For help understanding big numbers, ask xkcd. Basically, the span of the biggest black hole's event horizon stretches for this number of miles:

18,350,000,000 miles

My next step involved finding out the size of the sun, because the sun is the biggest thing I know and can see and with which I mayhaps have some sort of understanding. So I read about the sun... heat... fire... solar system... moon... mass... distance... earth...

diameter: 864,938 miles.

And I thought to myself, "well, that's not very big."


Of course the Earth is smaller than the sun, and the continents and oceans are smaller than the Earth, and you could keep going like this until you get to quarks, but compared to the vastness of the universe, the sun isn't very big. Neither are we.


But who cares? Because we have great big minds which try ever so hard to encompass great big ideas which are mind boggling and socket blowing and bubble popping all at the same time; and despite our desperately diminutive state of existence, we will continue to build whopping big robots that explode from the surface of the earth in search of life on other planets, we'll still jump in front of trains to save a little girl's life, and we'll still continue to fight with each other, just to prove that we're right.


*Speaking of Pluto, the probe which is set to reach the not-quite planet in 2015, moved closer to Pluto than any probe before it three days ago.) 

Black Holes and Wizards

In a recent episode of the Wizards of Waverly Place, one of my favourite television shows*, Alex and Justin are trapped in Alex's apartment and an evil wizard puts a black hole in the middle of the room. Now, I don't imagine that anyone could actually jump through tied to a rope and pull them through to the other side (which is how Max saved his siblings), but imagine how cool it would be to step forward and be instantly be somewhere completely different.

This is definitely not a new concept. As a matter of fact, Willy Wonka (with Charlie) was working on the technology when his corporation got shut down by the Flying Spaghetti Monster in 1879. I once did some learning about entanglement, which someone suggested might be the answer, but the math just exploded my brain and befuddled my sensibilities. But if a black hole is the answer (which it's not, but maybe wormholes are), and the appearance of one in downtown Switzerland doesn't completely destroy us, then I hope we make some when the Hadron Collider gets up and running (if it ever does).

Until then, our country will continue to build very large, energy consuming space vessels, and I will continue to write about imaginary transportation devices which allow you to traverse large distances in very short periods of time (I call them Doors). Then, when my novel is way, way better than it currently is, you can all read about them. And when this technology is complete, I will use these portals and mayhaps come give you a hug.

*Yes, please judge me because it means you're reading my blog. :)