Earth........a giant space ship racing arond the sun at light speed

[CanDman]

Most people don't realize that our planet is traveling at 107,000 km/hr or 67,000 miles/hr. I amazes me to realize how fast we are traveling through space......you can't tell from looking at the stars or the moon. You can't tell even by marking the daylight.....but looking at the canvas of the Almighty's paint brush with time lapse photography, it is impossible for me not to marvel with wonder and awe....by the beauty of it all. I found this clip and would love to see more like it...please...feel free to post.....


       
 Stargazing in the Canadian Rockies



Kev

[Charlie-brm]

It explains why my hair dries so quickly after I wash it and I don't even own a blower.

[red]

Most people don't realize that our planet is traveling at 107,000 km/hr or 67,000 miles/hr. I amazes me to realize how fast we are traveling through space......you can't tell from looking at the stars or the moon. You can't tell even by marking the daylight.....but looking at the canvas of the Almighty's paint brush with time lapse photography, it is impossible for me not to marvel with wonder and awe....by the beauty of it all. I found this clip and would love to see more like it...please...feel free to post.....
Kev

Kev,

Those numbers would be roughly 0.001% of lightspeed, but yep, that's SpaceShip Earth.  
Please note, we have no escape pods aboard, so we need to take care of it.    
The Sun, with the Earth and the other planets, is headed generally toward Vega, at about 140 miles per second.

Our Sun is just one minor star in the outer rim of a barred-spiral galaxy, called our Milky Way galaxy, which probably looks like this:



There are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy (which is kinda puny, really, as galaxies go).  
It's a LONG way to the next closest galaxy, called Andromeda, but you can see that one without a telescope.

Twice lately, they pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at two places in the sky that looked totally empty, just black space.  
The resulting photographs were amazing.  
It seems logical that these pictures would be repeated in any possible direction that we might look, from Earth, if no other stars were in the way.  
Hang onto your hat, and use both hands:

HUBBLE TELESCOPE ULTRA DEEP FIELD. THE MOST IMPORTANT IMAGE EVER TAKEN

Cheers,
Red

[Capn Ron]

Wow...that's just beautiful!  I spent last weekend camping out in the Mojave Desert here in Southern California.  Escaping the ambient light of Los Angeles, the sky was awash with a mind-numbing amount of stars!  I spent some time gazing up at all of them and realized that man...throughout time has done exactly the same and must have had at least as many questions as I had.  We're all just here for a brief flash of time...soak in as many stars as you can.

Cap'n Ron. . .

[ribbert]

Yep Kev, that sure is beautiful. I have also been lucky enough to view the night sky through some of the clearest air on the planet. I could not believe it. 40 years later I still have a vivid image of it in my mind. It is something that needs to be seen first hand.

Mind, I could never describe it as well as this bloke.

http://youtu.be/OQSNhk5ICTI

Noel

[CanDman]

 


   Hey fellas....thx for posting......it's hard to imagine how there can be so much beauty around us and yet so much pain and fear and anguish within us. Funny you know......I was watching "The Hunt for Red October" the other day and one scene in particular caught my attention. The American Sub is hunting top secret Soviet Sub with a hydrodynamic propulsion system making the sub virtually silent. Now here is this sonar expert listening for anything that could reveal this stealth(silent) sub. After several hours he goes to the captain with audio recordings of what the Subs computer registers as seismic anomalies or mating whales and tells the skip that the computer is wrong. He plays this audio to the Captain at regular speed...and nothing....sounds like nothing !! Then he plays the same audio at 10 times normal speed and realize that it is man made because of the regular pulse intervals.

in fact here's the clip


     Hunt for Red October - Jonsey Reports  



My point in all this.......is........if we can conclude that something is man made by the consistent pulse of a time interval ........how come it is so hard to recognize God within the constant and precise motion of our planet within the heavens  

I don't mean to sound preachy but I just don't understand why people look so hard not to see it.......we live on a giant ball, spinning every 24 hours on a 22 degree axis in a synchronized orbit around the Sun. And we do it every  31,536, 000 seconds .......... over the past 10,000 years (age of modern man)........that equals 315,360,000,000 seconds......... ......Now I am sure a lot of people lost a lot of money on the Super Bowl......but I don't think that there is a soul on this planet that would take these odds of all this being an accident........




       A Year on Planet Earth (4 Seasons)    

 

[FJ_Hooligan]

I recommend reading Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Everything"
I just finished it and it was one of the best books I've ever read.
He gives very good layman's descriptions of cosmic events/distances as well as just about everything else from Earth's geological history to microbes, cell structure, DNA, and evolution of the species.
So much had to go just right, from the position of Earth and the type of Sun we have to the first oxygen creating ooze, that the development of life has to be more than just good luck or random chance.
I'm not doing it justice, look up a professional review.  Excellent reading.

[Pat Conlon]

^^^ Yep, Bill Bryson is special. Here's a favorite quote:
"If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp."
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Science and the concept of a higher power (God, Allah, Jehovah, whatever) can coexist.
It's not that science disproves God, it's just that science is too young to understand.

[FJ_Hooligan]

Thanks for the correction on the title, Pat.
I was killing time on a rainy night, waiting for traffic to let up from the evening rush, when I wandered into a Barnes and Noble.  Strolling by the tiny Science section, the cover caught my eye so I picked it up and flipped it open to a random page.  Just reading a single random paragraph was enough to convince me to buy it.  I'd never heard of Bryson before but his writing style and ability to convey complicated topics in a familiar way, while still keeping the wonder of the enormity of the concept, is simply amazing.

Of course I'll destroy all my literary credibility by confessing that I'm currently reading a Tucker Max book.. :-)

[movenon]

I'll get a copy for an "on the road" read . 
George

[Pat Conlon]

.......I'd never heard of Bryson before but his writing style and ability to convey complicated topics in a familiar way, while still keeping the wonder of the enormity of the concept, is simply amazing.....

I agree 100%. Here's an example of how Bill puts the existence of mankind into perspective:

"If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long."

Yea, Bill is a treat to read..

[CanDman]

Thought provoking to say the least.....the hurdle that I have regarding a 4.5 billion year old earth...would be this.....how big was the sun that long ago? Studies have shown the sun to be shrinking at a rate a 5 yrds every hour. Not really significant over 10,000 years (age of modern man) but over billions of years that becomes a significant number. The radius of the sun would have reached the orbit of Mercury. I use the reference of 10,000 years because it is the only point of which creationists and evolutionists agree upon when dating modern man. I will try to get my mitts on this book by Mr. Bryson, I will have a long flight coming up soon....would be a good way to shorten my flight......      

[FJ_Hooligan]

Kevin, the Sun has also evolved over time.

The controversy throughout early scholar history on how old the Earth is is one of the good chapters.  Greats like Newton, Halley (the comet guy) and Lord Kelvin debated this number over their lifetimes.  Many significant theories and discoveries needed more time (i.e. an older Earth age) than the prevailing "experts" were willing to conceed at times.

The other wonderful thing about the book is Bryson's ability to find a plethora of the obscure people who did incredible work but just missed the big discovery or their work was falsely credited to someone else.  He finds truely remarkable people throughout history that you've never heard of and relates their story.  Genius!

[ribbert]

Bill Bryson's "Down Under" is a terrific read, even if you're not coming to Australia. A highly recommended read for those are. Those that live here would find it a great read anyway. Bryson is a very entertaining writer.

Noel

[Pat Conlon]

....I use the reference of 10,000 years because it is the only point of which creationists and evolutionists agree upon when dating modern man...."

Ah yes, the classic Old Earth vs Young Earth argument...... Kev, you missed the point.

Don't get tunnel vision on the minutia....mankind's 15 minutes of fame....or was it 45 minutes?

Step back, try to get a feeling of the big picture and blink your eyes...

It's 65* clear and sunny!  I'll think I'll go for a ride and watch the sunset over the desert. Life is good.