It took them long enough.

.
To confirm what Carl Sagan told us 20 years ago.

The speed of light is 186,282 miles per second in a vacuum. I've never been in a vacuum, but, I was once in an altitude chamber with the air sucked out to simulate being at over 40,000 ft above sea level. Then we took our oxygen masks off to see if we could tell when we noticed anything like passing out.


I was doing real well up to about the 4 minute mark when they told me to put the mask back on. I heard the words, I knew what they meant, but I was incapable of acting on what I knew and was told. Thankfully the government doesn't like to let all that money they spent on junior birdmen go to waste, and they put my mask on for me..

If aliens ever suck all the oxygen out of our atmosphere, we'll just quietly keel over dead thinking everything is hunky-dory as our lungs keep expanding and contracting until the brain shuts down for good.

But back to this article. Apparently anytime we look up in the sky we are looking at the past. The more distant the object the further in the past we're looking. If we find Proxima Centauri in a telescope we see light beamed earthward over 4 years ago.

Some say that pictures from the Hubble Telescope show galaxies 15 billion light years ago. Are they still there? If we could travel faster than light would we arrive where they are supposed to be, to find only rubble, the results of inter-galactic warfare perhaps?

Einstein's theories supposedly tell us we'll never be able to break the light barrier. I prefer to think that anything the mind of man can conceive, man can achieve someday.

Does this contradict what bible believers think, that the earth is only 6000 years or so old? It always strikes me as a little arrogant for anyone to claim to know the mind and will of God in as much as it relates to his purpose for us. If intelligence is the glory of God, shouldn't we best be trying to obtains as much of intelligence as possible? It strikes me as a little demeaning to think that an intelligent creator would want us to sit around on clouds singing hosannas for eternity, or to never discover how to travel to the farthest reaches of space one day.

Or should I pull the Kudzu up over my head in an effort to hide from his wrath?