When we think of space many of us think of an empty silent place with so much area we could not realize the true vastness of it using the brains God has given us. In a way many parts of our solar system seem this way. This picture can be very misleading. There have been quite a few near misses of the earth by meteors lately and it certainly doesn’t take a very big one in comparison with the size of the earth to either wreak havoc or even destroy life on earth. Scientists will tell you we are a cosmic target and it is only a matter of time before we are hit with something which will alter our way of life. Some are saying that is the reason for all the underground construction which is going on now and it is to benefit those in power and the elite of our society. The benefit would be a place to go to avoid a catastrophic collision. This would be of no help if the object which hit the earth was over a certain size, but it might enable some people to survive a much smaller hit.

When astronomers look out into space we know they are looking into our past for everything they see is in past time, because it take light time to reach us. We have to assume what we see is still going on or even that it is still existing, but we certainly could be wrong. The problem is we see a lot of chaos when we look out into space. There is so much of it we have to wonder if it would even be safe to travel into deep space, because there seems to be so much which could happen to damage, or destroy a space vessel. Let’s start with the simplest of scenarios. We launch a manned ship and it reaches another planet relatively unscathed. The crew lands the ship, but then they find there are unknown types of events affecting the planet which could damage the ship such as a very strong magnetic field, tremors and other dynamic activity. While there may not be any dangerous life on this new world, it could be so dangerous to land on the ship would not be able to take off for several different reasons.

While we don’t know if black holes actually exist, we think the overwhelming evidence points to their existence. Let’s take our manned ship back out into space. This time we have gained warp capability and are traveling in the direction of a black hole, but it is so far away we are not worried about it. Then something happens, we are being pulled off course because it turns out the black hole has a far stronger gravitational pull than anyone thought and we are caught in it. We are able to turn our ship around, but we are still being dragged toward the black hole. We manage to escape this time by blasting away with our engines on full power, but next time we might not be so lucky. What we didn’t know is there were other things affecting the pull of black holes and these things magnified the pull and caught our ship. This is fictional of course, but who knows what is waiting for us. There could be plenty of traps out there.

We could be traveling along in our ship and travel into some gases which are very thin and unnoticeable at first, but as we travel along they get thicker. They could be so hot that they begin to effect the skin of our ship causing damage to it. The field of gas could be so broad we cannot get out of it on time to avoid catastrophe. Some say this could never happen, because sensors on our ship would have picked up the gas far before it could have damaged us, but I have to ask this question. Can sensors be programmed to alert us of every danger even those we have no idea about yet? The answer has to be no, because of the simple fact you cannot program a sensor to detect something you don’t know exists. We just don’t know enough about space to be prepared to protect ourselves against every contingency. Space is a very dangerous place.

I think all of us have seen those old movies where a spaceship enters a meteor shower and has to dodge rocks traveling at many thousands of miles per hours. The truth is no human could ever maneuver through one of those. Think about it for a second. The meteors are coming at you at about 25,000 miles per hour, you ship is traveling far faster into them. There is no reaction time, you would be dead and your ship destroyed. About the only thing you could do is go around something like this, but these meteors are not the only problem. There are much smaller objects which go down to the size of a grain of sand which are going to hit you ship as you travel. The International Space Station has a primitive defense against this. It uses several layers of material to catch these things as they try and blast through the station. They are called micro meteors and micro meteor storms exist. People simply do not realize how many micro meteors are out there. Let me give you an example. In 1957 when the first measurements were made to see how many of them hit the earth in one year the amount turned out to be 14,300,000 tons. They are a very real threat in space.

Next there is this question, are there some objects we may not be able to see which could pull our manned spaceship off course and ultimately destroy it? Scientists constantly talk about dark matter. This is matter we cannot see and they believe exists. There has not yet been convincing proof of this, but they believe it because physics states there is not enough visible matter in the universe to make the universe behave the way it does. This does lead to another question however and that is could we be wrong in believing we know how the universe behaves or could there be something else making up for what we believe is dark matter? One scientist believes it is electricity and this is what really controls the universe. Could our fictional spaceship be sailing along and then get hit with a gigantic bolt of electricity which would destroy it?

Yes space is dangerous and we are yet to know all its dangers. When we look through our telescopes and see things millions and billions of light years away we have no way of even knowing if they still exist. There could be something out there which is destroying everything and we don’t know this, because all we are seeing is pictures of the past. It could turn out space travel might be extremely dangerous and far more dangerous outside of our solar system than inside. There could be places with areas of radiation so powerful they could melt our ship and gamma rays so dangerous because they remain powerful for hundreds of light years of travel.

It just might turn out all these dangers have taken a toll on the amount of life which can exist in the universe and it might be rarer than we expect.