Lost In The Stars

"A still more glorious dawn awaits, not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise. A morning filled with 400-billion suns and the rising of the Milky Way."  -Carl Sagan

Our whole lives, we have been here on our beautiful home of earth. It is a wonderful and a unique place, for it contains life. Life as we know it is pretty fantastic. We are capable of so much, so who is to say that we're stuck here on our beautiful blue dot?

December is a month of fantastic miracles that happen every day. These range from snow all the way to those cookies that we leave out on the 24th disappearing. These occurrences amaze us regardless of whether we know how or why they happen.

There is one thing that amazes me no matter how many times I see it, though. This fantastic occurrence is that of a sunrise. It never ceases to amaze me because it is just so punctual every single morning. The sunrise is never late because it was caught in traffic or because something "came up."

When you think beyond the sun, a curious thought arises. If the sun always rises at the same time, could it be possible that the sun isn't the only thing that rises? As far as we smarty-pants physics geeks can gather, yes. When we look up into the sky at night, there appear to be billions of stars, and each one of those could be another sun.

Sagan imagined that within our lifetimes, we could venture beyond our beautiful blue dot. In doing such, he believed we would see something more incredible than anything we could imagine. We wouldn't just see a sun rising; we would see all of the stars rising alongside our home galaxy: The Milky Way.

That is a very interesting and scary thought. Venturing out into unknown space is, well, unknown. The rewards in doing this could be limitless or they could be totally worthless. There is a risk to everything that we do, but the reward could be something that is as coveted as double chocolate chip cookies, and who would turn those down?

If you stop to slow down and just take a look at the stars on a clear night, then you may find yourself lost deep in thought as I often do. As human beings, we think that we know everything, but in that quick look to the stars that idea is lost. The beauty of our existence is that we don't know everything. We only know what has been keeping us around, and in the long run I think that is going to be enough.

Just remember: sometimes it is fun to lose yourself in thought while staring up at the stars. In doing that maybe you can learn something about yourself that you didn't even think was there in the first place.