Astronomy Buff

Stargazing: Better Than Sex For Relieving Stress

by Tony on January 21st, 2007

You’ve just spent two hours on a choked highway trying to get home. You’ve been sitting in your car so long that the local National Public Radio (NPR) station has looped the two hour show and you’re listening to the same stories a second time. You’ve used up a quarter tank of gas, and dumped several pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In fact, you’re beginning to suspect that your personal commute is probably responsible for at least a 0.0001 degree rise in the temperature of the planet.

You get home, try to pull yourself out of the car seat that, inexplicably, won’t let go of your ass, check the mail and look over dozens of bills. The minimum payment on all of your credit cards exceeds the gross national product of Haiti.

As you walk into the house, the kids haven’t cleaned up after their afternoon snack, the dog is wiping his ass on the carpet and just past the brown streak you see that the cat is scratching a tunnel through your new couch trying to get to a dried Cheez Puff underneath.

You stand staring at the scene before you, left eye twitching uncontrollably, when finally, your spouse, who now startles you because he/she suddenly looks like Emperor Palpatine, walks in the door and asks, “What’s for dinner?”

You’re not quite sure what happened next, but the police report said something about firing Hot Pockets out of a microwave and a Double Fudge Jello Pudding Cup throwing rampage. Further, one police officer commented in his report: “I’ve never seen anyone do that to a cat before.”

Technorati Tags: astronomy, cosmology, night sky, observing

So, it goes without saying that you’ve had better days. As you sit in the backyard mumbling “I like petunias” over and over to yourself on the swing set, you happen to glance up at the sky.

The night is clear, and still. And even though there is a goddam, motherf*&king streetlight shining in your face, you can just make out the constellation Orion. To the upper left you notice the bright red star, Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star over 900 times the size of our Sun and over 430 light years away, looking calmly down on you. Amazingly, it doesn’t really seem to give a sh*t about the brown streak on your carpet.

Then, even though you can’t see it (damn streetlight), you look just below the belt of Orion where the great Orion Nebula lies, a stellar nursery 30 light years across where this very minute stars are being born anew into our vast universe.

As your gaze leaves Orion and slowly scans the celestial sphere, it begins to sink in just how large and beautiful this universe is (and it’s getting larger all the time). You know that there are many galaxies, each filled with over 500,000 million stars like the Sun and Betelgeuse, slowly cartwheeling across the universe. All of them speeding away from each other as the universe expands, in danger of hopelessly hurdling itself into oblivion.

The entire universe, everything that ever was and ever will be, is evaporating before your eyes, performing an enormously beautiful cosmic dance.

The universe has around 125 billion galaxies in it. Each with over 500,000 million stars, with each star holding the promise of life and perhaps a civilization, with each civilization containing perhaps 5 billion citizens.

From this, you begin to appreciate that maybe today isn’t all about you. That maybe the bad job, lack of money and lack of appreciation from your family aren’t really all that big of a deal.

It dawns on you that the universe is a place of infinite possibilities. There is more to know about the universe and what is possible than our brains could ever hope to understand. Even with all we know, we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what’s out there and how it works.

If the universe is infinite and full of unimagined possibilities, then so are you. Your life is a reflection of the universe in which it resides. Your life contains within it the same infinite possibilities.

Very slowly, a smile creases your (until recently) contorted face. Perhaps there is a life within these possibilities that you can create and enjoy.

You get up out of the swing and go inside to find Emperor Palpatine. You are full of possibilities now, calmed and settled, with a universe of choices ahead. Your loins start to tingle. It’s time to give the Emperor a demonstration of the power of the Force baby.

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POSTED IN: general astronomy