Did you ever look up into the night sky and wonder about our place in the solar system. I’m sure you have, in fact, there isn’t a human being alive or dead who hasn’t. How did the moon get there? Where is our solar system in relationship to the galaxy we live in? Are we the only living creatures alive on planet earth, or are there intelligent beings on other planets? These are questions that have been asked for ages, and we are getting close to answering some of them….
It has been established by the scientific community that the moon broke off from our planet earth eons ago. This topic has been studied for a long, long time, but it took the manned lunar missions to establish the make-up of the lunar rocks. When our solar system was formed billions of years ago, violent collisions were taking place with much more frequency than they are today. Of course, these collisions happen all the time, that is why the moon is so pockmarked by them. But because the moon has no atmosphere to speak of, and nothing to slow comets and asteroids down, they impact with tremendous force in one piece, causing the craters we can see from earth.
Earth is impacted as well, but we’re lucky in that we have an atmosphere to slow down and burn up space debris. Unless we’re talking about a huge, house-sized asteroid, then most of them burn up in our atmosphere, causing what we like to call “shooting stars”. The shooting stars are nothing but the space debris being burned up by our atmosphere. These objects fly around our solar system in highly irregular orbits, and every once in a while they hit our atmosphere and burn up. Sometimes, however, large asteroids get through, like the one that caused the dinosaurs to disappear. This object impacted the earth with the force of thousands of nuclear blasts, and the dirt that was kicked up into our atmosphere caused a dimming of the sunlight, lowering the earth’s temperature and causing our ice age. Bye, bye dinosaurs!
Where is our solar system in relationship to our galaxy the Milky Way? We are on the outer edge of one of the spiral bands, kind of out in the boondocks. Thankfully so, because it’s been discovered that almost every galaxy in our universe, and there are billions of them, have a large black hole in the center. Black holes are intense monsters that suck up everything in their path, and the gravity is so extreme that light itself can’t escape! That’s why they’re called black holes. So here we sit, orbiting on the fringe of our galaxy, wondering if there are any other creatures out there wondering about their fate. I believe they are out there somewhere, in fact maybe they’ve been here. Maybe we came from them! Fertilized long, long ago by some alien race… Who knows? It’s in the realm of possibility, right?
