Do you see it?
There!
Bursting forth from a solar plume at 186,000 miles a second is cluster of light photons combined in a single shaft of sunlight.
Beautiful isn’t it? ….or aren’t they beautiful, depending on how far you’re willing to take it. An array of thousands of colors and spectrums in reality but to your eye (with its natural limitations) it is best described as…golden.
In 8 minutes the little “shiny” arrives at Earth….Earth…..25 thousand miles in circumference…. weighing six septillion, five-hundred, and eighty-six trillion tons……
Earth…..spinning at a thousand miles an hour with perfect balance….moving around the sun at a thousand miles a minute in an elliptical orbit of 580 million miles. All the while….hanging in empty space. In 8 short minutes…the light arrives.
The little ‘shine’…appears just in time for tiny Chen’s newborn corneas to fuzzily behold the break of day. Just in time to be a part of the setting sun as Maria and Anthony stroll along beach (…He’s actually about to propose in about 5 minutes…). Just in time for Bob Jenkins’s squinting eyes to use it on the long commute home…and for Muhammad Petal’s non-caffeinated groggy mind to use it for the morning drive to town. Some of the little lights photons are lost along Earth’s journey absorbed by Aspen trees in North America for photosynthesis…transferring some of the warm glow to usable energy.
Speaking of the usable energy….the little light is also assisting other rays of solar radiation to warm the planet Earth itself. One temperate climate region in particular, due to the solar heat, currently has 18 hundred storms in operation. The expended energy of these storms is producing one billion, three hundred million horsepower…not to motion is giving Jonathan Kent’s Kansas farm much needed rain…his was worried whether his corn crop was even going to make. Then there is the power given in the evaporation of water. Did you know that four inches of rain water over an area of ten thousand square miles would require the burning of 640 million tons of coal to evaporate enough water for such a rain and to cool again the vapors and collect them in clouds would take another 800 million horsepower of refrigeration working 24-hours a day for a hundred days? Pfff….the solar radiance of a colony of sun beams….can do it in no time! But back to this lttle light…at this very moment he and his brethren are helping over 4 billion birdlife in North America alone….How would Mrs. Lori’s rooster crow without a shiny to tell him when? How would the geese migrate…or the moth know when to go left…and when to go right.
But it doesn’t stop there….
On the bouncing-baby-beam continues….reflected here…refracted there…until off it shoots back into the space! How exciting?! Back in the great something-nothing that is SPACE…..
Let us look forward….
It’s a been a year, now since the sun belched forth the little “shiny” and 6 trillion miles have been put behind it….oh! the things it has seen. Cataclysmic galactic debris with such shear force it appears to be on fire in a vacuum…to the tiniest of flotsam and jetsam…unnoticed by the monolithic planets and plotouids that catch meteors in belts of gravity. Volcanoes of magmatic ice. Atmospheres of gaseous lead. Comet heads from ten thousand miles to one million miles long and with tails a hundred million miles long, traveling at 350 miles per second. Swish…zoom…pow….the sounds of a vacuum…you know….if vacuums had sounds…..they would probably sound like Godzilla…hmmm. Anyway, the lack of sound may make it more visually stunning….without distraction….focusing only on what is reflected from the light…..oh, the light! In 3 years the little sunbeam-that-could will approach another ascribed source of luminescence…Proxima Centauri…a red dwarf. Smaller than the little light’s former home but 40 times denser.
Just think in a mere 23 years, 20 stars will be behind it! 32,000 years and the light will be at the center of the Milky Way! 50,000 years and it will leave the galaxy…leaving behind 100,000,000 billion stars! In only 1.8 million years and this little light will reach the next galaxy…the Andromeda! Only 50,000 Billion left to go before leavening the entire universe!! What else can the collection of photons say to culminate such expectancy except, “Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
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