MPJ

Let's turn our imagination to the edge and do something different today. We can call it thought experiment, childish game, day dream, science fiction, pure fantasy or whatever we want but let's move the boundaries far away from Earth, far away from our Solar system, even farther from our Galaxy and do something wild. Let's choose a planet. Or to be more precise, let's select one in the vastness of cosmos and move away from this Earth and start new life. Of course in day dreams we are allowed to do this just because the imagination is what our species differs from others on Earth. Ok, to begin this little endeavor, we need a little astronomy to start with. What we know for sure is that our galaxy alone contains more than 200 billion stars, majority of them not so much different from our Sun and by using basic statistical study based on planet finder's microlensing technique there are approximately 100 billion planets orbiting them. Perhaps more. Multiple that b...

Do you know how big is our Solar system? I can't be sure of course, but there's a strong possibility that common knowledge about our planetary neighborhood ends with enumerating most of the planets, one dwarf planet and couple of named moons, asteroids and comets. Amazingly, the truth is far, far beyond that and believe it or not, if we include Oort cloud, the Solar system, with us representing its only living residents, is approximately 3 light years in diameter. This is, more or less, equal to 3e+13 kilometers or 30.000.000.000.000 km. The distance about 100 million times bigger than the distance to the Moon. It is tremendously huge and just about one and a half light years shorter than the distance from our Sun to the nearest star! The layout of the solar system*

I remember every little detail from that weekend trip. From the very first moment when we stepped into the bus that took us to the mountain base, throughout the rest of the first day when we climbed down into small cave with narrow hallways toward the small chamber at it's end. I vividly remember glorious, endless and hard-to-find second cave we stepped in the very next day, followed by overwhelming feeling and little fear when we passed through cave chambers, cutting the darkness with handy tools and small flashlights. I will always hate myself, for not having a camera to capture surrounding scenery when we traveled by train later that afternoon, who looked like it came right out of 19th century with wooden benches rolling the railways slower than Usain Bolt. All those rock formations and abandoned train stations were slowly losing their battles with nature and were looking exactly like a background from Sergio Leone's spaghetti western movies. Viktor at Rundetårn observ...