Understanding the enormity of time and space
NOAO image gallery photo of M33 Shelton said, "It takes our galaxy about 220 million years to make a complete revolution.
Robin Shelton explains the perspective of an astronomer.
When I was a kid, I grew up in an area that wasn’t quite suburban, and it wasn’t quite rural. And I just had a lot of time on my hands to sit around, looking at nature. And I thought it was beautiful.
Now astronomy gives me a completely different understanding of the enormity of time and space.
For example, our Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Probably for most people, that’s simply a big number without any real meaning. Or say you go to a museum, and you read about the dinosaurs. You learn that they died out 64 million years ago. That’s also just a big number.
It’s very difficult to put all of these big numbers into context, to have an order to them. The geological terms just become mush in a person’s mind. As I’ve gone through astronomy, everything has begun to fit together and make sense. These aren’t just big numbers to me anymore.
What I mean is that it takes our galaxy about 220 million years to make a complete revolution. And 220 million years ago, the Appalachian mountains stopped being pushed up.
As you work in astronomy, you start to get an understanding of an incredibly long time scale. Once you have that understanding, the universe makes more sense to you and it becomes easier to appreciate everything around us. It’s easier to appreciate the stars, or the Earth. It’s easier to appreciate human life as being incredibly short.
And there’s also an ecological component to it. Because then you have to wonder, will we live as long as the dinosaurs or are we just going to be a flash in the pan? And what is going to be the cause of the end of us? Are we going to be the cause of our own demise? Or will we manage to resolve our problems and live as long as the dinosaurs?
Astronomy gives you a context to place everything in.
