We have some explaining to do. This is a very short piece. Not much more than 350 words A question more than an opinion. A fascination with all things universal. But then sometimes when we don’t tell you what to think you think a great deal more. So here it is.
“We certainly were surprised to find such a bright young galaxy 12.8 billion years in the past,” said astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the research team. “This is the most detailed look to date at an object so far back in time.” (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer-20080212.html)
I was just reading the NASA website talking about what the Hubble Telescope sees in outer space. It truly looks back in time seeing what happened over 12 million years ago. Now have you ever just imagined that you were out there and not here. If you were 12 million year away and had your own Hubble Telescope, you could have a complete and perfect answer to all the questions about creation, the big bang, fossils, dinosaurs and Dick Clark! Don’t you just love thinking about it. It would seem to me that even though there are unanswerable questions, from where we sit anyway, out there in the universe there are answers. All we have to figure out is how to go far enough away and look back at where we came from. We too could learn from the past if we did that.
A friend found this concept very interesting but when trying to apply the logical (engineers) application to it, he was just stumped. He could not stop saying, “But you could not get out there and back soon enough to tell us what the answers are.” The more I thought about it, the more I realized how symbolic it all was. The idea that you and I would know is not important, anymore than saving the ecology will leave you and I seeing it’s results. The idea is that someday, someone could actually say, our world was created by a big bang and a entity much like the one we call “God” lit the fuse. Or, it was a horrible accident caused by children playing with matches, or there is a God and he set us on our course 12 million years ago. The answers would be eventually found. The idea is that we start now, today and even yesterday, to begin the journey.
So,I for one, believe that we are so fascinated with the universe because we realize that the answers to unanswerable questions are not close at hand but far away. As with life, the further away we get the clearer things become.
