PROCONNESUS

The universe is a very big place. Its enormity defies human comprehension. Our imaginations, formed and evolved on a single planet, are limited by terrestrial dimensions, rendering stellar distances inconceivable. Educational models of our solar system sacrifice size for clarity, further reinforcing the fallacy that other cosmic objects are nearby. In proportion, they are staggeringly far away.

   Even the distance to Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor, the Moon, is shockingly large: almost ten times the circumference of the Earth. And yet in space this is unusually close. The sun itself is four hundred times farther away. Rays of light, appearing to travel instantly, in fact take eight minutes to reach us from the sun. When we watch something happen on the sun, we know it occurred eight minutes ago and yet we are seeing it only now. Sunspots and solar flares happened in the past.

   When we gaze into the night sky, we are looking back in time.

   Venus and Mars, our nearest planetary siblings, are comparably distant. Driving to Mars at the speed of a regular automobile would take one hundred and seventy-five years. Our exploratory space-ships, traveling at eleven thousand miles per hour, take seven months.

   Orbiting the sun at increasingly greater distances are the larger planets, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. Although still subject to the sun’s gravitational control, these too are extraordinarily remote from each other and from us. Imagine specks of dust circling a boulder many miles away. And between these few bodies, floating so far apart in the cold silence, lies nothing whatsoever.

   Neptune, outermost of the planets, is thirty times as far from the sun as is Earth. And at a similar distance lies tiny Pluto, its eccentric course swinging it within Neptune’s orbit every few hundred years. At temperatures close to absolute zero, Neptune and Pluto alone inhabit an icy darkness infinitely more remote than humankind has ever ventured.

   And beyond Pluto there is nothing at all until one reaches the outermost rim of the solar system, where the sun’s influence finally dwindles and fades to nothingness. Here lies a scattering of small rocky bodies known as the Kuiper Belt. Held in check only by the faintest tug of the sun’s gravity, these amorphous bodies float serenely in the inky blackness, unseen, unknowable, on the very brink of interstellar space.