I rarely listen to the radio outside of my car.
Fridays on the way home from working there is always NPR's "Science Friday" with Ira Flatow.
Yesterday he was speaking with a science expert on the forthcoming collision between our galaxy - the Milky Way - and our nearest large galaxy Andromeda. A spiral galaxy like our own, Andromeda is about 2.6 million light-years away. Andromeda also seems to be heading right towards us at 250,000 miles per hour. That's the distance to our moon covered in an hour.
There's obviously no avoiding this cataclysmic event. We're doomed.
The good news is that this will happen around 4.5 billion years from now.
Our sun will still be shining brightly in the earth sky, like it has for the last 6 billion years.
I have to wonder who or what will be inhabiting this planet then. How am I to wrap my feeble mind around this? It is so large, so grand, so far beyond the reach of this humble mind...that words don't quite match up to it. We think we're pretty big cheese, we humans, as we stride across the globe making friends and enemies, blowing things up and building things up, ranting and chanting and telling each other what to do. We make such beauty and such horror. I don't think we'll be around when the Andromeda Galaxy comes spinning into our territory, our tiny spit of territory that makes up the 5 or 6% of matter existing within all of this Dark Matter or Dark Energy or Dark Dark Dark.
But Something will be here. Something will be here under the same old sun.
