A Novelist Grapples with the Scale of the Universe

Hello everyone, and a big welcome to my new subscribers! I apologize for neglecting to send out any new posts lately. Our post-Helene house cleanups and repairs have taken a new direction as we prepare the house for sale. This has been a bummer for me, as living by the sea has been an answer to a life-long dream, but despite the beauty all around me I am troubled by the idea of salt water pouring in my windows again and my wife and I decided that we just don’t want to do it anymore. This hurricane has proven to be the biggest disruption to my life since my divorce over 25 years ago and although it has pretty much settled out by now, we feel that we just don’t want to remain exposed to the risk any longer. I am grateful to have lived my dream for 10 years, and although we’re not sure where to go, we are ready to seek the next adventure life has for us.

Even after things began to settle down, I found it hard to get my writing life moving again. As Hemingway once said, “I can write anytime I’m left alone and not worried.” Unending tasks and an uncertain future are not conducive to deep creative thought, and I found myself perpetually waiting for “things to get back to normal” before I tried to crank out my next novel. My attitude was also getting funky, so my wife suggested that I spend the day doing some kind of writing to get my mind and heart back in order. (She knows me so well.)

As I was drying out old handwritten manuscripts to see what could be (or should be) saved, I found some interesting pieces that I thought I might share. I know typing these out will be good to get my “machinery” going again, but I hope you will find them interesting as well. I will only post the best of them.

I wrote this first piece as an alternate introduction to the novel Seed of Aldebaran. I was trying to convey the idea of the vastness of space (something most modern science fiction seems to ignore) so I crunched the numbers and wrote it out in everyday language to show how big things really are out there. In the end I decided that it would bog down the novel’s opening, and reduced the ideas to about two paragraphs which would allow an easy transition into the start of the story. I think those of you who have read Seed will agree. But it is an interesting conceptual exercise and I hope you will enjoy it. Let me know what you think.

Alternate beginning for Seed of Aldebaran –

It has been said that the immense distances that lie between the planets and stars are nearly incomprehensible to the human mind. It is only when we factor in variables such as speed and scale that we can gain even a nominal understanding of the staggering vastness of the universe around us.

For instance, a person walking at 5 miles per hour would cover a distance of 10 miles in 2 hours. Traveling in a car at a highway speed of 60 miles per hour would cover the same distance in 10 minutes. Traveling in a jet airliner at 500 mph would cover the same distance in a little over a minute.

The same jet liner traveling from New York to Los Angeles would take around 5 hours flight time to cover the distance of 2445 miles. A car traveling at highway speed, in a perfectly straight line, at a constant speed of 60 mph, with no traffic slowdowns or stops for food, fuel, or bathroom breaks would cover the same distance in 41 hours, or 1.7 days.

The Moon, our nearest neighbor in space, lies some 240,000 miles distant. At highway speed the trip would take 6 months. At jetliner speed the trip would take 20 days, assuming travel in a straight line at a constant speed. The Apollo astronauts traveling at speeds of up to nearly 25,000 mph, and averaging 3400 mph made the trip in 3 days. (From their highest speed the tug of the Earth’s gravity constantly slowed the spacecraft, and their flight was not in a straight line to the Moon but took a longer angle to intersect with the Moon which was also in motion.)

Beyond the Moon the statute mile becomes too small a unit to realistically measure interplanetary distances, so astronomers use a measure called the Astronomical Unit, which is the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Mars orbits at 1.52 AU from the Sun and traveling at the top speed of the Apollo spacecraft a person would take 150 to 300 days to make the trip from Earth. (The variance would depend on speed and alignment between the two planets.) Similarly, a trip to Jupiter, 5.2 AU from the Sun, would take 2 to 6 years. A trip to the heliopause, which is the farthest extent of our solar system and forms the border into interstellar space at 123 AU from the Sun, would take decades. Voyager 1, traveling at speeds far greater than those attained by the Apollo spacecraft, covered the distance in 35 years.

Even radio waves, which travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, reveal something of the vast distances covered. A radio transmission sent to Mars can take 12 minutes to reach its destination. One sent to Jupiter takes 43 minutes, and a radio transmission sent to the heliopause would take 7 hours at the speed of light.

But these planetary distances, meager by interstellar standards, can be perplexing as they relate to speed and time. So here we may shift our scale in order to grapple the immensity of space.

For instance, if the Sun were the size of a basketball, the Earth would be the size of a sesame seed and would orbit 82 feet away, or the length of an extended tractor trailer. Mars would be half of a sesame seed lying 126 feet away from the Sun, or the length of a small jetliner. Jupiter would be a large grape orbiting at 416 feet distance, or the length of a navy guided missile frigate. Neptune would be a large pea 2523 feet from the basketball, nearly half a mile away.

Now in order to take in the distance to our nearest stars, let us shrink the basketball sun to a pea. This puts the scale at 1/200,000,000,000^th (two hundred billionths). The Earth, too small to be seen with the naked eye, would lie 2.3 feet away from the pea. Jupiter would be a poppy seed 12.8 feet away, and the Voyager 1 probe, which passed into the heliopause several years ago, would be 317 feet away. Our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, would be a radish seed 125 miles distant. Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, would be a marble some 250 miles distant. Betelgeuse would be a car some 30-40 light years away.

At this scale we just begin to grasp the immensity of the universe. At this scale we just begin to grasp the permanence of eternity. At this scale a planet is a tissue cell, a nation is a single virus, and people are mere electrons.