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If the Milky Way By George S. Carter If God moved at the speed of light, would anything really get accomplished?
ong, long ago in a galaxy far away, the forces of the dark side were finally overcome and hopes of a brilliant future beat afresh in the hearts of men. Did mankind subsequently get from there to here? Technology back then was so much more advanced than ours on earth today, was it not? But no, that was just fiction brilliantly brought to the silver screen by George Lucas and a superb crew of technicians, providing background for a stellar cast in the Star Wars series.
Our own Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light-years across and about 1,000 light-years thick. It contains at least 200 billion stars (perhaps twice that many), but we really aren't quite sure. Ours is only one of 50 galaxies in this little corner of the universe, each pinwheel disc rotating at 600 kilometers a second (360 miles per second), which is the preferred estimate, and it means that the earth is traveling around the galaxy at something over 50 million kilometers a day, or 19 billion kilometers a year.
If the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across, it would take 2,500 generations of mankind to cross it at the speed of light (assuming 40 years per generation); and that sort of Star Trek becomes practically useless. Now science fiction can take us into the universe at "warp speed" by means of some faster-than-light propulsion that ignores the laws of physics. Imagination is a wonderful thing, but the idea of warp speed seems to be a physical impossibility for any space vehicle and its crew, unless we can reduce them all to a beam of photons to be reassembled, complete with life and intelligence, at the proposed destination. Don't hold your breath, as they say.
We measure time on earth in years, months and days, and project it onto the cosmos at 186,000 miles per second, but that relates to energy and light as we see it, and we cannot see beyond our limited physical framework. What is the speed of thought? Is that God's speed? Does thought have substance -- "I think, therefore I am," as René Descartes observed? That reaches into the realms of philosophy, but what is the reality?
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Keywords: speed of light speed of thought interstellar travel size of the universe space travel
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