Space – HemmingPlay

December 29, 2016December 29, 2016

Darkness and Light

hs-2003-28-a-1440x960_wallpaper
What is “Dark Matter?”
No one’s ever been able to catch any
in a quart canning jar, as we did as kids
in the summer nights with lightening bugs.

As nearly as my math-less writer’s brain can tell,
it is the power of something unseen, deduced only
by observed gravitational effects on stars, on galaxies.

Something very big, but still a guess, in other words.
Subject to experimentation. Grants. Scholarly papers.

Astrophysicists say this is important, which may be true;
I also suspect sometimes they’ve been smoking weed up
there on the high, cold mountain outside the
telescope house, huddled around campfires,
telling math jokes and giggling, high as fuck.

Continue reading “Darkness and Light”

May 19, 2016May 19, 2016

5 Billion Years of Solitude*

MilkyWay_Java_justin Ng

Are we alone in the Universe?
After 5 billion years of solitude,
Are we really alone?
For the first time in human history we are getting the non-religious answer:

Nope. We can’t be.

Here’s the math:

100 billion planets in the Milky Way (conservatively speaking; it is probably four times that)
Of that, astronomers estimate 50 billion would be rocky worlds in some way similar to Earth (or four times that)
1/10th of 1% of these = 50 million that might be water worlds (or four times… oh, you get the idea)
Too much? Ok, cut it to 1/100 of 1% of 50 billion. That’s still a whopping 5 million

Five million Earths.

Maybe more. Maybe a lot more.

So, no. We’re not alone.

I’m just afraid of one thing: That we’re maybe the galaxy’s cockroaches, and the 5 million of our neighbors are one giant Orkin fleet with really big flyswatters.

________________________________________________________

I’ve been reading science fiction since I was in the 5th grade, and have been a total space geek. I read this book a while ago, but since then there have been some radical discoveries with Keppler that have changed things. A lot.

It’s now very plausible, if not highly probable– no, it’s definite–that there are a Kirk-load of planets very much like Earth.

This means there must be others. Like us, or very, very, very different. But others. Bet you (one of you) $5.

But why does that not make me feel good? I do not feel good. And I watched ET and everything.

17707637 * 5 Billion Years of Solitude,
By Lee Billings

May 1, 2016May 7, 2016

Skimming the Edge of Wonder

Sing a song of beginnings,
Of times beyond knowing…
Float me up to the mouth of the void and kiss me, gently;
Cut the bonds of convention, set me loose
‘Til sunrise paints the world again in fire and life
And my true spirit is called forth by awe and wonder.

June 3, 2015June 3, 2015

I Think I Might Have Missed A Turn Back There

You know that moment when some idea just-weird-enough-to-be-worth-blogging-about happens? The it’s-not-true-but-ought-to-be moment? The kind of thing we normally keep to ourselves but have gone slightly cracker dog? So we don’t..?

I just had one of those.

You know about Moore’s Law for computers? Where they double in power or speed every few months now? So more and more transistors can crunch numbers faster and faster, and the computers are so small that every human has at least one in a pocket—except when it’s glued to said humans’ hands, which is pretty much 24/7. I mean.. c’mon, people!

But I digress….

I wondered… when a certain point is reached, and the Web—the Baby Hive Mind—switches on one day–no, I mean REALLY SWITCHES on— and makes people forget kitten videos on Facebook, and Kim K’s non-human butt, forever. And we all realize the damned dress WAS Gold and White, dammit!

And once switched on, phones…home.

What I wondered (oblivious to a dozen serious problems with this assumption) was…. what if we’re part of the experiment? That we’re designed to build eight quadrillion microscopic computers and hook them all together globally? And what if we’re only one of a billion planets, all doing the same thing, and someday all switched on?

I wondered the same thing you just did: Exactly who–or what– would we all be trying to call?

And you know that other kind of moment? The one where you notice people are backing away from you slowly, a look of concern on their faces?

I just had one of those, too.

But there are pills that can fix it.

February 15, 2015February 15, 2015

La Lune, La Lune

Above the night she sails austere,
Chill face hides peaks forlorn;
Alone she rises from the edge,
Alone she lights the sky.

Beneath her rolls a world asleep,
Or lonely loves’ distress;
Or skein of geese, for Southland bound,
Wing blackly ‘cross her track.

Three hundred million years from now,
When you and I have gone,
And insects rule what once was ours,
Will they remember us?

Will they build moonships to La Lune,
And scramble ‘cross her skin?
Will they find bootprints we left there,
And wonder how we fell?

January 1, 2015January 1, 2015

The Most Astounding Fact

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Under the Heavens,

We, made of those very stars,

Breathe wonder and awe.

The Most Astounding Fact (Download)

July 20, 2014July 20, 2014

When the Moon Became Real

On this day in 1969, July 20, the first human stepped onto the surface of the moon. It may not seem like much now, but trust me: It was a BFD. The whole world stopped and watched, and held it’s collective breath as the Lunar Lander touched down with barely any fuel left.

If you were born after this event, it might be easy to misunderstand how radically this changed our view of the Moon—and the Earth. It had floated overhead from the Earth’s earliest days, billions of years, and yet we experienced it as almost a fantasy, a mysterious thing we had never touched.

On this day, it became a real thing for the first time in all of time. A real thing. We stood on it, and it was no longer a nightly mystery.

The last astronauts on the moon left garbage behind. They left their footprints, of course, too. And scientists believe those imprints—planted in another era by long-since retired moon boots—could last for millions of years amid the craters, faint reminders that the sooty surface of our favorite satellite isn’t so far from home.