Friday, June 29, 2007

The Calendar Page Changes

It’s time for me to change the calendar pages in my studio. I have to keep them a day ahead, for production purposes, so I turned them after I finished my show today. One has twelve pages of radio antennas from various stations. Ok; you’d have to be deep into radio to look at that every day for a month, but we broadcast types get off looking at these towers and, amazingly, can often identify a station just by looking at its transmitter antenna site.

The other is more of a favorite: it shows photos of the universe. This month’s was of a galaxy, a side view, one much like ours. As I turned the page, I saw the coming photo of a star that had blown up who knows how long ago. It takes light a long time to travel through the universe. This star went ka-boom a long time ago and we are just seeing it now.

One calendar page was of a section of the sky where you could see nothing but galaxies. Dozens of them, each composed of perhaps 300 billion stars and their planets. Maybe some with life that moves around, thinks and gets along with each other.

Or doesn’t get along with each other. Same as us. I look at those photos and wish I could show them to people who want to set off nail bombs in London, or suicide bombs in the Middle East, or any group that dislikes any other group. It’s a huge universe that we are a part of and, given our short life span in a 13.6 billion-year-old place, getting our own way at the expense of others’ lives is an extraordinarily petty way of living. We are but the tiniest of bugs fighting to be kings in a drop of water.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home