Journey to the Edge of the Univer
O
ur world. Warm, comfortable, familiar… But when we look up, we wonder: do we occupy a special place in the cosmos? Or are we merely a celestial footnote. Is the univer welcoming or hostile? We could stand here forever, wondering or we could leave home on the ultimate adventure. To discover wonders, confront horrors, beautiful new worlds, malevolent dark forces, the beginning of time, and the moment of creation. Would we have the courage to e it through? Or would we run for home? There’s only one way to find out: journey to the edge of the univer.
Our journey through time and space begins with a single step at the edge of space, only 60 miles up… just an hour’s drive from home. Down there, life continues. The traffic is awful, stocks go on trading and Star Trek is still showing. When we return home, if we return home, will it be the same? And will we be the same?
We have to leave all this behind to dip out toes into the vast dark ocean on to the moon. Dozens of astronauts have come this way before us. T教职工趣味运动会活动方案welve walked on the moon itlf. It’s Just a quarter of a million miles from home, three days by spacecraft. Barren, desolate, it’s like a derted battlefield but oddly familiar. So clo, we’ve barely left home. Neil Armstrong’s first footprint looks like they were made yesterday. There’s no air to change them. They could survive for millions of years---maybe longer than us.
Our time is limited. We need to take our own giant leap---one million miles, 5 million, 20 million miles. We’re far beyond where any human has ever ventured. Out of the darkness, a friendly face appears---The goddess of love, Venus. The morning star, the evening star, she can welcome the new day in the east and say good night in the west. A sister to our planet, she’s about the same size and gravity as earth. We should be safe here. But the Venus Express space probe is tting off alarms. It’s telling us, the dazzling clouds, they’re made of deadly sulfuric acid. The atmosphere is choking with carbon dioxide. Never expected this Venus is one angry goddess. T培训心得he air is noxious, the pressure unbearable and it’s hot, approaching 900 degrees. Stick around and we’d be co
rroded suffocated, crushed and baked. Nothing can survive here. Not even this Soviet robotic probe. Its heavy armor’s been trashed by the extreme atmosphere. So lovely from Earth, up clo, this goddess is hideous. She’s the sister from hell pockmarked by thousands of volcanoes. All that carbon dioxide is trapping the Sun’s heat. Venus is burning up. It’s global warming gone wild. Before it look hold, maybe Venus was beautiful, calm more like her sister planet, Earth. So this could be Earth’s future.
Where are the twinkling stars? Are the beautiful spheres gliding through space? Maybe we shouldn’t be out here, maybe we should turn back. But there’s something about the sun, something hypnotic, like the Medusa. She is t侦探推理小说oo terrible to look at, too powerful to resist and luring us onward on, like a moth to a flame.
两腮长痘Wait, there’s something el, obscured by the sun. It must be Mercury. Get too clo to the sun, this is what happens. Temperatures swing wildly here. At night, it’s minus 275 degrees, come midday, it’s 800 plus. Burnt then frozen. The MESSENGER space probe is telling us something strange. For its size, Mercury has a powerful gravitational pull. It04年属啥’s
a huge ball of iron, covered with a thin veneer of rock. The core of what was once a much larger planet. So where’s the rest of it? Maybe a stray planet slammed into Mercury blasting away its outer layers in a deadly game of cosmic pinball. Whole worlds on the loo careening wildly across the cosmos destroy anything in their path. And we’re in the middle of it.
Vulnerable, expod, small, everything is telling us to turn back. But who could defy this? The sun in all its mesmerizing splendor. Our light, our lives and everything we do is controlled by the sun. Everything depends on it. It’s the Greek god Helios driving his chariot across the sky. The Egyptian god Ra reborn every day. The summer solstice sun ris at Stonehenge. For millions of years this was as clo as it got to staring into the face of God. It’s so far away that if it is burned out, we wouldn’t know about it for eight minutes. It’s so big that you could fit one million Earths inside it. But who needs number? We’ve got the real thing. We e it every day, a familiar face in our sky. Now, up clo, it’s unrecognizable. A turbulent a of incandescent gas and the thermometer pushes 10000 degrees. We can’t imagine how hot the core is, could be tens of millions of degrees. Hot
enough to transform millions of tons of matter into energy every cond. It’s more than all the energy ever made by mankind. It dwarfs the power of all the nuclear weapons on Earth. Back home, we u this energy for light and heat. But up clo, there’s nothing comforting about the sun. Its electrical and magnetic forces erupt in giant molten gas loops. S怎么文玩核桃ome are larger than a dozen Earths and more powerful than 10 million volcanoes. And when they burst through they expo cooler layers below making sunspots. 惠普打印机换墨盒A fraction cooler than their surrounding, sunspots look black but they’re hotter than anything on Earth and massive up to 20 times the size of Earth. But one day, all this will stop. The Sun’s fuel will be spent. And when it dies, the Earth will follow. This god creates life, destroys it and demands we keep out distance.
This comet strayed too clo. The Sun’s heat is boiling it away creating a tail that stretches for millions of miles. It’s freezing in here. There’s no doubt where this comet’s from, the icy wastes of deep space. But all this steam and geyrs and dust, it’s the sun again, melting the comet’s frozen heart. It’s so strange. A kind of vast, dirty snowball, covered in grimy tar. Tiny grains of what looks like organic material prerved on ice, sinc
e who knows when maybe even the beginning of the solar system. Say a comet like this crashed into the young Earth billions of years ago. Maybe it delivered organic material and water, the raw ingredients of life. It may even have sown the eds of life on Earth that evolved into you and me. But say it crashed into the Earth now. Thinking of the dinosaurs, wiped out by a comet or asteroid strike. It’s only a question of time.
