The horizon of the earth looks like a flat line until you get farther away. When you get into outer space it actually becomes a ball, a complete circle. It’s surrounded by cold, dark, empty space sprinkled with stars. Negative space it’s called in the art world.
Humans (as far as we know) had never before been into outer space until cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin from the Soviet Union circled the globe in 1961 and came back down. Once was enough.
Pretty fantastic stuff until you realize that we are already in outer space on a planet sized space ship with a protective membrane called an atmosphere and traveling at 67,000 miles per hour around our friendly luminous sun. We’re spinning at 1,000 miles per hour as we travel and our whole solar system is orbiting the galactic center of the Milky Way at 500,000 miles per hour.
I think about that as I ride my bike down Broadway at 18 miles an hour (pretty good for a pedal bike). I can’t even see the horizon, just buildings, just cars and streets and trees but we’re still in outer space. At the entrance to Ave. B, by the Witte Museum, I turn off onto the bike path that runs alongside the park. The trees crowd close to the road on one side and on the other side businesses and schools and offices have sprouted up but I’m still in outer space.
We’re inside the protected bubble but we’re in outer space already! We think we’re on a planet that’s solid and stable and everything will always be this way. A convenient assumption but not true. Our earth will be destroyed one day by a no longer friendly sun that has run out of hydrogen and expanded into a red giant devouring the solar system, or atleast the inner planets. We’re a tiny part of an endless universe that nobody knows how big it really is. The part we can see so far is 93 billion light years across and expanding rapidly. Pretty cosmic.
As I ride my bike down Ave. B on the way to the cafe I wonder how small things are. Are there infinitely small things as well as infinitely big things? And we are somewhere in the middle? Whoa watch out a pothole.
I have big ideas on my bike. Sometimes I have to stop and get them down on voice recorder before I forget them. Like, wow, the horizon is infinite because it never stops. If you were riding your bike around the world the horizon would always be there, unfolding. There is always a sunrise happening somewhere and there’s always a sunset happening somewhere. Like super wow.
Think of the greatest thing you can think of. I’ll take a moment . . .
Ok, what have you got? A fantasy? A feeling of love that doesn’t stop? Oh good one. A car that runs on sunlight and goes 100 miles an hour and never needs to re-fuel? God? A super creature with super powers that knows everything? A perfect dinner with a perfect friend with excellent conversation? I imagine a peaceful life full of joy from horizon to horizon. What’s beyond the horizon? Nobody knows. It’s a mystery. A beautiful mystery.
I dunno, I think we should expand our horizons. They’re only limited by . . . ourselves. I’m imagining writing my space opera trilogy. It would be fantastic. It would change the world as we know it. I don’t know if I can do it but I’m gearing up. Sitting in the cafe conceiving. Looking around and aspiring. It would be fantastic. We need more fantastic in our world, less normal, less boring, less conventionally programmed.
Imagine an exploding star (pic from book) A supernova, ejecting newly made elements into space. Outer space. And then condensing into planets and circling around new stars and maybe life forming and maybe somebody sitting in a cafe writing about it. Everything they can think about, expanding their mind, their little brain evolved from billions of years of developing and adapting on their little planet, their little biosphere, their little bubble of life on their little planetary spaceship blasting thru the cosmos.
Hmm. Crazy. No horizons.
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