Thursday, January 27, 2022

The Sky Is Full Of Stars

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

The blue sky fades as day turns to night, revealing the night sky. The stars light the sky like snowflakes on a cloudless and moonless night. It only occurred to me how big our universe is once I had basic knowledge about astronomy. For instance, the fastest speed in the universe is light, traveling up to 300,000 kilometers per second. From our perspective, that's really fast. A trip to the moon would take at least a second. A trip to the sun takes more than eight minutes. But a trip to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, takes four years, and a journey to the nearest galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, takes at least two million years. The light from the stars was emitted at least tens of thousands or even millions of years ago. Ten thousand years ago, no human civilizations or even settlements were founded in any part of the world. Two million years ago, the first humans emerged in Africa.

Some people doubt and mock us whenever we dream big; it will never happen. But the stars constantly remind us that they shine and glisten under the night sky, even if it takes their light to reach us for a long time.