EVOLUTION AND CULTURE
My friend and former next door neighbor Don Collins has a large telescope in a little observatory in his back yard. Currently he is observing two stars that are orbiting each other 300 light years away. I can’t imagine how far a point in the universe is that it has taken light 300 years at 186,000 miles a second to reach here. I probably have all the measurements misremembered and wrong from his explanation last Friday at our old men’s coffee. But it turns out that these two stars are rotating around each other at an enormous speed. One of the stars is a normal star and the other star is a dwarf star, of similar weight to the normal star but burned out and so shrunken and compact that a cubic centimeter, the size of a marble, weighs many tons. While a normal atom is mostly empty space with a nucleus and electrons swinging around it in enormous circles, meaning I am mostly empty space, in a dwarf star atoms are compressed with no empty space.
The point is, whether I have the figures right or wrong, that the two orbiting stars, so far away that they are barely visible and only detectable by the blinking of light on and off as they circle each other 300 years ago, are completely fantastic and unbelievable.
But these two orbiting stars are only one tiny part of a universe so huge and so ancient that it is impossible for me to comprehend how huge it is.
And yet my friend Don matter of factly explains this universe to our coffee group. If I were him as I experienced this I would be lying on the floor banging my head on the concrete as I went quickly mad.
And somehow in this nutty universe, inexplicably, life came into existence, life that reproduced itself, and through mutation after mutation, most of them leading no where, came an amoeba and then me. Talk about crazy.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 