That's a rough estimate of the number of stars in the universe, according to someone in the know. 10E 20 is a one with twenty zeros behind it, which looks like:
100,000,000,000,000,000,000
That's a lot of stars. I slept too much last night and while I tried to go to bed early this evening, so I'd be fresh as a daisy at work tomorrow, I'm not tired at all... yet. So my mind went on a tangent and here I am again, wide awake and writing it down. The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second which is rather fast. The distance to the moon from earth is around 380,000 kilometers, depending on where it's at in its wonky orbit (I guess nobody's perfect, so it can have an elliptical orbit if it really wants to...) This means that light takes about 1.3 seconds to get from the surface of the moon to earth. That's pretty damn quick. If I was to obliterate the moon into 10E 20 pieces, then it would only take 1.3 seconds for everyone in the visible path of light reflecting off the moon to notice it. Sound, being pokier than light, would take longer to be noticed, but it would probably be noticed by many more people, as sound would have a physical impact on earth and reverberate. Light from the sun takes approximately eight minutes to reach earth, making it less appealing for complete obliteration... and also having the downside of destroying our solar system and its energy source in the process. All for what? ... a display of power. Which it is not, in my humble opinion. True power lies in creation. Anyone or anything has the power to destroy. What we lack is the power to create, or more to the point, our powers of creation are much more limited than our ability to destroy. Thus, we are not god in total. The sun is pretty damned powerful to send energy, aka. rays of light, across the emptiness of space (which isn't really empty, but is a reasonably sound excuse for a vacuum) and across the solar system to hit us in only 8 minutes, give or take a second. People, being made up mostly of HtwoO, are basically kindling waiting to happen. Sunburns are a small taste of what the sun can do to us in a very short period of time. Extend that time and people basically become raisins. Water evaporates at a constant rate given a certain temperature, air pressure and several other conditions, and if someone was, for example, left lying in the middle of the desert, said person would evaporate, or at least their fluids would, leaving a dried out shell, made thus by nothing more than rays of light coming from the sun. A very powerful thing when you think about it. Thus, people are not really much more than raisins, or I should say grapes, with common sense enough not to lay in the desert and evaporate. So with all these suns scattered across our galaxy and the countless others out there, the amount of energy available for anyone with the ability to harness it is almost infinite. And as we are a relatively new form of intelligent life, how long will it be until we find a way to at least tap into this energy directly and find a way to make use of it directly, rather than just be recipients of it's free discharge (meaning we have a free energizer bunny that lead to our existence and current status as beings who are able to be) Moreso, without any proof for or against the existence of intelligent life somewhere not in our solar system, and that being life as we know it, as we can only imagine what possibilities of existence can be, then if any beings wished to realize humanity, and had the ability to harness the energies of the suns, what could they do without humans ever knowing it? And if they wanted to display true power would it be through destruction or through creation? And if a being can do this what is the limit of its power of creation? And if its limits go beyond our ability to imagine, does it come any closer to being able to realize god than we do? Or is it just as limited in that respect as we are, and is there some other being that it looks to find, that has even one limit less, so that it can find a realization of god?
I found happiness in a banana flavored ice cream cone today, and then this crap is what I have to deal with when I'm trying to fall asleep early. It's always there and spinning around non stop each and every minute of every day, some silly new tangents going this way and that, but it's loudest when I want to go to sleep and I'm not tired. If life were as simple as a banana flavoured ice cram cone I'd be bored stiff and would probably have died off years ago, but just once in a while I'd like to go to bed sober, not tired and not have to deal with this crap.
That took forever to write down, and only a little while to run through my head. At least I'm tired now. Bon soir, my pillow awaits.
