In St Exupery's tale Le Petit Prince - a young prince falls to earth from his asteroid planet B6-12 and is stranded in the desert with a pilot with whom he discusses many riddles of life.
In our own times there are constant asteroids flinging past earth daily. Some are just dust. Others have to potential to obliterate whole cities if their trajectory were to take them toward earth. Phil Plait is a scientist with a website called Bad Astronomy who talks about such asteroids. One of them Apophos had the potential to do just that depending upon various fairly minute mathematical changes that could influence its course. He says, "We have not had an impact the size of what hit the dinosaurs in 65 million years," but Apophis is going to pass by the earth in 2029 so close that is will pass under weather satellites. It was supposed to return again in 2036 and if it hit a certain window in space called a "keyhole" it could slam into earth. It's been linked to some Mayan calendar predictions of end times. In Egyptian mythology Apophis was the destroyer god who tried to eat Ra the sun god.
Discovered in 2004 it has given NASA scientists the time to study such traveling time bombs and try to hit them with launched rockets which set them on another gravitational course. The B6-12 Foundation (named for our "Little Prince") has set about learning how to manipulate these "giant rocks" flying around out there with very gentle "ion drives' which push these asteroids out of harms way. His TED Talk is very inspiring and the good news is that some Mayan predictions say we have another 7,000 years. So breath easy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4tL6AM_bo
On that same NPR TED Talk Radio Hour I heard Jill Tarter speak about stardust. She is the founder of SETI Institute whose mission is to understand the origins of the universe. They actively seek signs of life beyond our own and Jill was the inspiration for the scientist in the 1997 movie Contact.
This is what she says about stardust:
JT: “We are the products of a billion year lineage of stardust. We as humans, have this very intimate connection with the cosmos. If you think about the molecules of haemoglobin in your blood, there’s a lot of iron there. And that iron in the haemoglobin molecule was created — it was manufactured by nucleosynthesis inside a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. So inside you are the remains of a star explosion.”
NPR: “Stardust in our veins?”
JT: “Absolutely — you are made of stardust.”
As a Reiki practitioner this makes total sense to me. Universal energy. Those asteroids hurtling through space and our bodies are not such strangers. The energy that created both was all together at the big bang. As I look up at the summer night sky and feel the warmth of the summer sun, both takes me out of the mean and tangles political cruelties of the day and makes me realize my connection to the greater whole - and to the light.
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| Le Petit Prince on asteroid B6-12 |
In our own times there are constant asteroids flinging past earth daily. Some are just dust. Others have to potential to obliterate whole cities if their trajectory were to take them toward earth. Phil Plait is a scientist with a website called Bad Astronomy who talks about such asteroids. One of them Apophos had the potential to do just that depending upon various fairly minute mathematical changes that could influence its course. He says, "We have not had an impact the size of what hit the dinosaurs in 65 million years," but Apophis is going to pass by the earth in 2029 so close that is will pass under weather satellites. It was supposed to return again in 2036 and if it hit a certain window in space called a "keyhole" it could slam into earth. It's been linked to some Mayan calendar predictions of end times. In Egyptian mythology Apophis was the destroyer god who tried to eat Ra the sun god.
 |
| Ra the sun god as a cat killing Apophis the destroyer |
Discovered in 2004 it has given NASA scientists the time to study such traveling time bombs and try to hit them with launched rockets which set them on another gravitational course. The B6-12 Foundation (named for our "Little Prince") has set about learning how to manipulate these "giant rocks" flying around out there with very gentle "ion drives' which push these asteroids out of harms way. His TED Talk is very inspiring and the good news is that some Mayan predictions say we have another 7,000 years. So breath easy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4tL6AM_bo
 |
| Apophis impacting earth's atmosphere |
On that same NPR TED Talk Radio Hour I heard Jill Tarter speak about stardust. She is the founder of SETI Institute whose mission is to understand the origins of the universe. They actively seek signs of life beyond our own and Jill was the inspiration for the scientist in the 1997 movie Contact.
This is what she says about stardust:
JT: “We are the products of a billion year lineage of stardust. We as humans, have this very intimate connection with the cosmos. If you think about the molecules of haemoglobin in your blood, there’s a lot of iron there. And that iron in the haemoglobin molecule was created — it was manufactured by nucleosynthesis inside a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. So inside you are the remains of a star explosion.”
NPR: “Stardust in our veins?”
JT: “Absolutely — you are made of stardust.”
As a Reiki practitioner this makes total sense to me. Universal energy. Those asteroids hurtling through space and our bodies are not such strangers. The energy that created both was all together at the big bang. As I look up at the summer night sky and feel the warmth of the summer sun, both takes me out of the mean and tangles political cruelties of the day and makes me realize my connection to the greater whole - and to the light.
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden
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