Space: it's such an adequate name for what surrounds planet Earth. We don't really know anything about it, it's just... space. The far distant galaxy. Outer space, if you will. If there's anything that makes you feel smaller than small, it's thinking about space. You may have heard about the newly discovered planet -- Gliese581g -- that may be capable of sustaining life, only twenty light-years away! One light year is close to 6,000,000,000,000 miles away, so just times that by 10 -- well, that is 60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles.

Yes, 60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles.

How can they even speculate the temperature of a planet that is ten light-years away? It's amazing. However, even though we know that, there's no way that we can get there. Not this generation. In fact, we can't even get men to Mars, which is just 33.6 million miles, at it's closest point in orbit, from the Earth. The Moon, the place which we have managed to land on (maybe....) is 238,857 miles away. That's not so far. It takes five days to get there. If you're being fuel efficient, 1 year 1 month and 2 weeks -- a trip done in 2003. It would take about 9 months to get to Mars, but then you have to properly plan so that you're getting there when it's at it's closest to Earth.

So... Why isn't more time being spent on developing a spaceship that can go light-years in seconds? I mean, no one is really solving world hunger or stopping wars or racism... but technology is booming -- yes, let's go with that.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that it's crazy. It's crazy that we live on a planet that we can see out of to the moon, with a sun that's just the perfect distance to heat us but not overcook us. It's crazy that we can see stars and planets, and that there are other stars and planets out there at all. It's crazy that there are other places in the galaxy with planets orbiting other stars that warm them -- like this Gliese581g -- and that isn't the end of the galaxy, that 60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. It keeps going. Is there an end? When you think of it that way, the chances of life existing on other planets is pretty big.

Man. Maybe I should have been a science major?