I would like to talk politics and fairness today, but there is no sense beating a dead horse, everyone can see what is going on, so instead I will be talking about space. There is fairness in space since every object of the same type is treated the same under the same circumstances. Space doesn’t play favorites. Recently a new type of black hole was found. What makes it so unusual is the fact it gobbles up cold gas instead of the usual hot. I guess there is no hot gas near enough to it. Scientists predict for the growth of black holes cold gas is better than hot gas. I have never heard this before. They state a black hole uses less energy to consume cold gas and thus can use the extra energy toward growth. I think I will take this statement with a grain of salt. My gosh, I have already used two old sayings in this first paragraph. Anyway there are some truly powerful forces in space just waiting to cause problems for anything which is too near them. When thinking about space and distances the word near really needs a new definition for us to understand it in this instance. A safe distance from the radiation from an exploding star has been cited by scientists anywhere from 50 to 100 light years. That distance would be about 587,862,554,124,841 miles for 100 light years and 293,931,277,062,420 miles for 50 light years.

In a way there is a bizarre fact here and it is we could be destroyed by a star which disappeared 50 to 100 years before, because its explosion and radiation would only be reaching us now. This means we have no way of knowing if the stars within this range are even still there or have exploded since the light from them takes so long to  reach us. There are about 2,000 stars within 50 light years of us that we know about and a guess would be almost 15,000 stars are within 100 light years from earth. This means the weapon of our destruction could be sitting out there now. We have been very concerned with objects striking the earth and we have been trying to create a way of finding them and destroying them before they could do damage. We don’t have the technology yet to protect this planet from massive gamma and X-rays would plow through space at light speed from an exploding star and hammer into the earth ripping off our atmosphere. As I have said many times before space is a very dangerous place.

I remember some of the old science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s where different disaster would happen to the earth. There were plenty of disasters to go around and some were not very farfetched. One movie which comes to mind was about planet X. It was spotted coming toward earth and the scientists on earth decided they could only save about 40 or 50 people so they didn’t tell the population about it. Hey wouldn’t this be true if the situation arose now? They worked feverishly on a ship which would take them to planet X as it got close enough because they found it had a friendly atmosphere. There have been plenty of movies made about disasters threatening earth. Remember the movie Armageddon where a large rock was headed toward the earth and NASA had to send up drillers to place a nuclear bomb inside the rock to guarantee it was blown up completely. Then there were the movies bases on alien conquest, but I will save that for another time.

I personally don’t believe we know even half of the dangers that could affect this planet and I am not counting the ones we cause ourselves like nuclear war. Take the sun for example. It is a very dangerous and violent object. It puts out something called the solar wind and this has been blamed for the loss of Mar’s atmosphere. If the sun could have done this to a planet much farther away from it than earth, under the right conditions could it do it to our atmosphere? There are people who believe it is possible for a giant solar flare to be so powerful it could destroy the earth. NASA scientists say this is impossible, but what have they got to lose with this prediction? If they are right we are fine and if they are wrong that would be the end of the earth anyway and we would all die. They base their answer on the fact the sun has been going through solar cycles every 11 years and this has been going on for millions of years without change as far as we know. Are we doing anything which could alter this and make the chances of damage from the sun more apt to happen? We certainly are causing global warming by dumping more carbon into the atmosphere which might somehow change the equation.

Another danger, though it is very remote is that a rogue star or even a rogue planet could rip through our solar system and we would be helpless to prevent this. Scientists have been finding out there are a lot more of these things than they first suspected. It makes sense since there are apparently so many stars and planets in the universe. A rogue planet or star is a body which for some reason has been hurled out of its orbit or place in its solar system or even its galaxy. Some travel at incredible speeds and if one of these things headed for us it would be game over. I don’t think we know all the reasons which create rogue planets and suns but we do think we know some. One would be something knocked this object out of orbit and the force sent it out of its solar system and maybe ultimately out of its galaxy. Another reason might be it just spun too fast and broke orbit with a sling shot effect.

Now that we have become more technologically capable we have also become more aware of some of the dangers to our planet. Many regular citizens know about this stuff which was not true a mere 70 years or more ago. Unfortunately with this knowledge comes anxiety for some people who really worry about this stuff a lot more than most of us do. To these people I say the earth has been here for billions of years and the chances of it getting wiped out are close to zero. Worrying about this will not help anyone one bit. It is just a total waste of energy. What we should be doing is increasing our efforts to perfect engines for manned space flight which will allow us to find out more about this universe of ours and who knows it might even help us to find other intelligent life.