I’m saying hello to Voyager 1. Yes, I’ve been teleported over 24 BILLION kilometres away from Earth to check up on a wonderous piece of kit built by NASA and launched nearly half a century ago.
I’m struggling to keep up; after all, we’re going over 38,000mph, and there is nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, to slow this little beauty down. If I were to send a signal back to good old blighty, it would take over 22 hours. So, I won’t bother
NASA reckons that if I hang on in here for about 300 years, Voyager 1 should enter the Oort Cloud, a spherical band far beyond Pluto’s orbit that’s full of billions of frozen comets. If I hang around for a further 30,000 years, we might reach the end of it. Nah, won’t bother with that either.
Amazingly, most things on this satellite are still working. The cameras, though, have long since been switched off to save power. To be fair, there’s no point having cameras now. They’ve done their job decades ago. This was the last picture ever taken, back in 1990 – the famous “pale blue spot”. That is our earth. All of humanity contained in one pixel. There’s nothing to see now, at least not for hundreds and thousands of years.
And that rather brings me to the reason I wanted to come here. To reaffirm my long-held belief that us humans are so unbelievably insignificant in the great scheme of things. As I glance all around me, all I can see is millions of tiny dots, all stars so far away, that this piece of human ingenuity will probably never ever reach one of them. At least I can still recognise the constellations. Unbelievably, they still appear the same as when I look at them from Earth. Wow, who would have known?
The other reason I’m here is also to confirm another belief I have. All this empty space, all this endless nothingness, and believe me, you have to be here to really appreciate the non-existence that surrounds me, why would any of the 4,000-ish gods that we worship back on Earth bother creating all this?
Now to the big question of the moment. Do I want to go back?? Maybe the subject of a future blog, who knows……
Teleport – where would I go?
To Mars. I would go to Mars.
I want to visit the Cydonia region, home to the legendary ‘Face on Mars,’ also known as the ‘Sphinx on Mars.’
The story began in 1976 with a Viking 1 orbiter picture of a mile-wide face-looking weird hill in the region. At the press conference, NASA drew public attention, only to immediately dismiss it as a mere ‘trick of lighting and shadow.’ However, some people didn’t buy this version, which became a massive mystery for the next 20 years. NASA actually had produced two pictures of the ‘face.’ They were taken at different altitudes with different sunlight angles in the summer of 1976.
Interestingly, both pictures showed a sphinx-like face staring up into the Martian sky, looking right at space visitors. Maybe it had a mysterious message for us…
The universe-size hype began.
Computer analysis, done in 1979 by two NASA-contracted scientists, Vince Di Pietro and Gregory Molinaar, showed that the ‘Face’ is most likely an artificial object.
That part of Cydonia, an ancient shoreline region, was soon called ‘The City’ as it was full of curious objects: ‘The D&M Pyramid,’ ‘The Cliff,’ etc.
Richard Hoagland wrote his bestseller ‘Monuments on Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever’ back in 1987. He said:
‘I realized that I was looking at something that was either a complete waste of time, or the most important discovery of the twentieth century, if not of our entire existence on Earth.’
Hoagland later appeared in a CNN report devoted to the ‘Face’ story; the man has been titling himself as a ‘CNN science consultant’ ever since. Later, Graham Hancock, whom I greatly respect for his investigative scientific research, joined the hype with his book ‘The Mars Mystery.’ I read this one: it was good. Unlike Hoagland, Hancock was much more cautious in his assumptions, though, after reading it, you still had a feeling that something actually was there.
And there were plenty of things. There was a Mars—Giza connection because that part of the Cydonia region was full of pyramid-like structures of possibly artificial origin. There even was a ‘sacred geometry’, like maths constants between various ‘City’ objects, etc. It was something science-like that hit your emotions.
The very idea of an ancient civilization that once flourished on Mars and then gone, leaving us the Cydonia monuments, was breathtaking and painful.
In 1992, NASA sent another orbiter, Mars Observer. It was lost when entering Mars’s atmosphere. The loss added to the hype. People like Hoagland blamed NASA for a cover-up, speculating that, in fact, Mars Observer was possibly not lost, but approached Cydonia and took pictures of something that people on Earth were not yet ready to accept. Something too dramatic and too traumatic to our mindset.
Finally, in 1998 and 2001, another Mars orbiter, Mars Global Surveyor, took pictures of that Cydonia object, just like the Face fans had been demanding.
Well… there was a hill, yes, heavily eroded by water and then by winds, blowing there for the last couple of billion years. As NASA rightly proposed back in 1976, it turned out to be a ‘trick of lighting and shadow.’
But I still want to teleport to Cydonia, walk on the surface and check out on-site: What the hell is going on there?
Teleport: Where would I go?
I can go anywhere, seriously? Like I don’t have to stop at Walmart or nothin? At first, I thought that would be great but the more I thought about it, the more difficult the idea became.
I could go to the Moon or Mars but there really isn’t much to do there. Nobody’s there to serve dinner or sell you trinkets at the beach. That’s because their beaches blow. Then I thought maybe I could visit some advanced society on another planet. After some thought, that’s a bad idea too. Maybe the dinner they serve is you. That sounds more than a little risky.
That leaves me with Earth: Really not feelin’ it. Once you’ve seen Suck Creek, TN. is there anything else? I like Italy; that place is like a dream. But I’ve already seen it and I’m not sure I would waste my one Teleporter trip on going someplace I’ve already been. Well, where would you go?
India and China are both hot and crowded. I understand Goa (India/beach) is really nice. I’m just not sure. To be honest, right now I mostly want to go take a shower. The water was off all day yesterday because the mains broke. I can’t make that my answer because, well… because.
I suppose I have to revisit one of the locations I dismissed earlier; I would go to the Moon. But I want to go to the Earth facing side in the middle of the New Moon. Why? Because the Moon’s surface will be dark and the Earth will be full and bright overhead. I don’t want to stay a long time mind you; maybe just an hour or two. Time enough to contemplate. I understand many find the experience of looking at Earth from above to be quite emotional.
Just lay against a big rock and watch. The Earth is much bigger and brighter from the Moon than it is the other way around. You can easily see on the moon in the dark.
I wonder if, after your eyes adjust, the stars come out? Remember, there’s no atmosphere, so the bright Earth doesn’t blot out the stars, or the Milky way. Those pictures from space are always so disappointing to me because the spacecraft are crazy bright and there’s not a single star. I don’t think it would be that way in real life. Would I become emotional? Would you?