galaxy

The different religions confused me. Which was the right one? I tried to figure it out but had no success. It worried me. The different Gods - Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Mohammedan - seemed very particular in the way in which they expected me to keep on good terms with them. I couldn't please one without offending the others. One kind soul solved my problem by taking me on my first trip to the planetarium. I contemplated the insignificant flyspeck called Earth, the millions of suns and solar systems, and concluded that whoever was in charge of all this would not throw a fit if I ate ham, or meat on Friday, or did not fast in the daytime during Ramadan. I felt much better after this and was, for a while, keenly interested in astronomy.

Waking up in the same place in which you dozed off has never happened either to you or to anyone else. Ever. Earth does not stop moving when you sleep. Every hour that passes, Earth travels a little more than 800,000 kilometres around the centre of our galaxy. And so do you. That's the equivalent of about twenty trips around the planet. Every hour. No one minds, though, as long as their bed stays still beneath their body.

i will forever be collidingwith a billion unnamedundiscovered stars, each of uson our own orbital paths.

For the Earth itself is a blossom, she says,on the star tree,pale with luminousocean leaves.

I stared up in disbelief at the information my eyes fed my brain, and lost myself to the stars.For the first time in my life I had a greater idea of how infinitesimally small our planet really is and, furthermore, how tiny and insignificant I am in the grand scheme of the vast universe.I took a seat on a rock next to Lily and took in the moment to comprehend the vastness of everything else, and the incredible smallness of I.

It's quite conceivable that [life] will eventually spread through thegalaxy and beyond. So life may not forever be an unimportant tracecontaminant of the universe, even though it now is. In fact,I find it a rather appealing view.

Living in a galaxy is like living in a neighborhood where the house down the street might have burned down four thousand years ago but you wouldn't know it for another three thousand years.

all hopes there, so close to each other,are pulled into the void every night;when a band of pale twinkles milking the wayacross the divine breadth of skywhere every heart belongs.- From the poem "The Universe In Blossom

The dark sky.A hundred million stars.More stars than I__e ever seen before. My eyes let me see farther, but they don__ show me the one thing I want to see. I would trade all the stars in the universe if I could just have him back again.Wind whistles through the trees nearby. Birdsong weaves in and out of the sound.The hybrids emerge from the communication building, heads tilted to the sky.And then we see the end.Godspeed__ engine was nuclear; who knows what fueled the biological weapons. But they explode together. In space, they don__ make the familiar mushroom cloud. They don__ make the boom! of an exploding bomb.There is, against the dark sky, a brief flash of light. It is filled with colors, like a nebula or the aurora borealis, bursting like a popped bubble.Nothing else__o sound of an explosion, no tremors in the earth, no smell of smoke. Not here, on the surface of the planet.Nothing else to signify Elder__ death.Just light.And then it__ gone.And then he__ gone.

That__his__s Orion__ secret. It__ not that the ship isn__ working, that we__e never going to make it.It__ that the ship has already arrived.We__e already here! There__here__s the planet that will be our home!It floats, so bright that it hurts my eyes. Giant green landmasses spread out across blue water, with swirls and wisps of clouds twirling over top. At the edge of the planet, where it turns away from the suns and starts to darken, I can see bright flashes of light__ursts of whiteness in the darkness__nd I think: Is that lightning? In the center, where the light of the suns makes the planet seem to glow from within, I can see, very distinctly, a continent. A continent. On one edge, it__ cracked and broken like an egg, dark lines snaking deep into the landmass. Rivers. Lots of them. Maybe something too big to be rivers if I can see it from here. Fingers of land stretch out into the sea, and dots of islands are just out of their grasp. That area will be cool all the time, I think. Boats can go along the rivers, up and down. We can swim in the water.Because already, I can see myself living there. Being there.On a planet that looks up at a million suns every night, and at two every day.I want to scream, shout with joy. But the air is so thin now.Too thin.I__e spent too long looking at Orion__ secret.The boop . . . boop . . . boop . . . fades away. There__ nothing to warn about now.Because there__ no air left.My sight is rimmed with black. My head pulses with my heartbeat, which sounds as loud to me as the alarm once did. I turn from the planet__y planet__nd start pulling, hand over hand, against the tether, toward the hatch. The ship bobs in and out of my vision as my whole body jerks. I__ panicked now and fighting to stay awake. I try to suck in air, but there__ nothing there to suck. I__ drowning in nothing.

Dust is the parent of a star!

I gaze out, to the stars. I remember the first time I saw real stars, through the hatch window. They were beautiful then, but now, seeing them here, all around me, beautiful feels like an inadequate word. I see the stars as a part of the universe, and having spent my life behind walls, suddenly having none fills me with both awe and terror. Emotion courses through my veins, choking me. I feel so insignificant, a tiny speck surrounded by a million stars.A million suns.Centuries away is Sol. Circling around it is Sol-Earth, the planet Amy came from. And one of these other stars is the Centauri binary system, where the new planet spins, waiting for us.And here we are, in the middle, surrounded by a sea of stars.Any of them could hold a planet. Any of them could hold a home.But all of them are out of reach.

Quantum theory tells us, Mr. Thomas, that every point in the universe is intimately connected to every other point, regardless of apparent distance. In some mysterious way, any point on a planet in a distant galaxy is as close to me as you are.

According to Thoth, because of the placement of the Great Pyramid on the Earth connecting into the Earth's huge geometrical field - specifically the octahedral field of the Earth, which is equivalent to our own fields - and because of the pyramid's mass and the geometries used in it, the white-light energy field spirals upward and becomes extremely strong, stretching all the way out to the center of the galaxy. The dark-light energy comes in from above, spirals through zero point and connects with the center of the Earth. In this way the Great Pyramid connects the center of the Earth to the center of our galaxy.

Look at the stars. It won't fix the economy. It won't stop wars. It won't give you flat abs, or even help you figure out your relationship. But it's important. It helps you to remember that you and your problems are both infinitesimally small and conversely, that you are a piece of an amazing and vast universe.

At every level in our inventory, nothing seems special about our Earth, our Sun, our Galaxy, our Local Group. Evidently, mediocrity reigns throughout. Such is our niche in the Universe.

your handtouching mine.this is howgalaxiescollide.

Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks.