THINK IT OVER

When faced with challenges, it is good to have some perspective.

The sunlight we see now was created in a nuclear fusion reaction which occurred 20 million years ago in the center of our Sun. It took 20 million years to travel from the center of Sun to its surface and from there it took 7 minutes to reach Earth.

Light a candle, bring your hand close to it and feel the warmth. Step away, how far do you feel the warmth? How far does the candle light the room? Go out in the sunshine and feel the warmth. Think, imagine - our Sun is 93,020,000 miles away and yet how bright it is and how hot it is, it can burn our skin if we stay exposed for just an hour.

Look up in the sky at an airplane flying high up in the sky, it appears to be just about one foot long at a distance of about 6 miles, where as when you are few feet from it, it is huge - over 250 feet long. The Sun looks about a feet or two wide and is 93,020,000 miles away. Imagine we can see an object 93,020,000 miles away with our eye. How huge it is! Our Sun is 865,374 miles in diameter - about 109 times that of Earth (7,918 miles).

Imagine, visualize the Earth rotating on its axis, the moon rotating on its axis and revolving around the Earth. Visualize Earth and Moon together revolving around the Sun at a dazzling speed of about 66,660 miles per hour. Visualize all Planets revolving around the Sun. Visualize our Solar System revolving around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at the speed of 500,000 miles an hour - about 138 miles per second. Visualize the Milky Way Galaxy rotating at about 168 miles per second and the entire Milky Way Galaxy travelling through the vast Universe at about 370 miles per second.

In year 2013, a meteorite fell in Russia and one fell on the moon. Every day thousands of meteorites enter Earth.

SPACE TRAVEL: Visualize space travel. Imagine we take off in a SpaceCraft or a Space Balloon. Visualize the view of Earth from your SpaceBaloon as it rises up higher and higher and into stratosphere and exits Earth's atmosphere. Imagine sailing into Space, passing by Moon. Imagine stopping at Moon for a bathroom break :-). Imagine looking at Earth from Moon. Visualize taking off from Moon, into Space. Visualize passing by Mars. Lets land on Mars and spend a few minutes there. Visualize how it feels to be on another planet - a lifeless planet. The land, rocks, sand looks so much like Earth, yet lifeless. We take off from Mars and journey onward. Pass by other planets -Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

Sailing through Space let us visualize -- feel the empty cold dark deep vastness of Space. Visualize how our Sun will look as we look back at our Solar System. We sail out of our solar system and into our Galaxy. Next few hundred million light-years we travel through our galaxy passing by billions of stars and solar systems. What if life is there somewhere out there? Visualize exiting our galaxy and sailing on, into deep space. Where does it end? Does our universe have a boundary? Strangely the science, the physics and chemistry is the same every where. It is the same sub-atomic particles, same atoms everywhere! What does all this mean? What is the meaning in our existence?

TIME TRAVEL: Let us travel back and forth in time.

Travel ahead in time 150 years and we are not there. Travel back in time 150 years and we did not exist - perhaps we will meet our great, great grand parents. Tell our great grand parents about the exciting advances in science and technology - iPhone, iPad, TV, Airplane, Computers, etc. Let us spend a week with our great grand parents, how does it feel? We dont have to buy water or use a filter. There is no need to buy organic - everything is organic. There is no pollution, global warming, toxic chemicals, etc. A whole range of health problems are simply not there. There are about one billion human beings on Earth.

Imagine that we have traveled back in time 65 million years and see Earth ruled by Dinosaurs - visualize how it feels. Travel further back 4 billion years and there is no life. Travel back in time 5 billion years and our solar system does not exist. All the elements that are part of our body - carbon, iron, etc., -- those found on Earth and other planets - were created from some massive dying star.

Travel 2 billion years into the future and watch our Sun die and Earth vanish. What will continue to exist in some form somewhere always and every time are the atoms that are part of our body today which are essentially the same atoms we see all around us. Every day billions of atoms leave our body and billions enter.

How much data can you save on your hard disk, on your smart phone, pc, usb drive, etc.

Visualize the birth of a human being, visualize when we were born. At conception - we are just a single cell - one single cell - size 0.14 mm. In just one single cell 0.14 mm in size we have the entire instruction – software and hardware, for creating a new human being. In one single tiny cell are all the atoms of various elements that together comprise the new human being and comprise the data and instructions to create a new human being. Rapidly the single cell divides into two, four, eight... You cant make out which cell or cells will go on to become various parts / organs in our body. In about 21 days the baby's heart is beating and the baby is just about 0.4 cm's long.

A human body is a collection of billions of cells. Every day in our body millions of cells die and new cells are born. We get a new stomach lining every 3 days. Imagine every day millions of cells in our body are dying but amazingly as a whole we are alive and we just dont even sense millions of cells within us dying.

Our genes make us who we are. Humans and Chimpanzees are 99.9 percent identical in our DNA. Humans have about 30% of our genes in common with a Banana. There are certain genes that perform very basic life functions and we have these in common with all living organisms - these genes are called ubiquitous genes. Studying genes confirms evolution of life.

A human being has billions of atoms joined and grouped together in a particular way. Imagine it was possible to manufacture a human being. Let us take the raw materials - atoms of various elements and manufacture a new human being. I wonder what would it take to make this brand new human being have the same behavior, thinking, attitude, etc., as one of us!

Life is a strange phenomenon. Knowledge is power! It is humbling to know the immense reality of space and time. Where we came from, where do we go, we don’t know. There is nothing more important than to be nice, to love, to harm no one and help make our world a better place – at least a little better than what it was when we arrived.

Capt. Surender Malhan.
President and CTO.
SpaceAge.