What Have we got to Gain? (Michael Greenwell)

[Tace]

Michael Greenwell -- World News Trust

May 7, 2009 -- Have you ever seen anyone urinate all over the shelves in a supermarket? No? Ok, I will return to that question via the stars.

I often ask people if they have seen the milky way. They usually answer "yes," and they are wrong.

You can’t see the thing because we are IN it.

The picture above (from dailygalaxy.com) is deduced from the painstaking observations of astronomers and is a best guess at how it really looks.

It is approximately 9,460,730,472,580,080,000 kilometres across and contains about 100 billion stars. Watch this for more of the basic information.

Although from where we are standing we can’t actually see the thing in its entirety, you can see part of it if you are out of town and in the mountains somewhere.

When I was in Nepal I was living quite high up (about 2,300 meters, or 7,500 feet) and absolutely nowhere near a town. It was four hours of difficult trekking to the nearest phone never mind anything else.

One night we were inside having our lentils and rice dinner and during this it got dark outside. After we had finished we walked out and I saw something I had never seen before and unfortunately haven’t seen since -- the milky way.

Obviously it wasn’t like the picture above. Looking around on the internet the closest naked-eye picture I could find to what we saw is this:



more

http://www.worldnewstrust.com/wnt-reports/commentary/what-have-we-got-to-gain-michael-greenwell.html

[ramapo]

1. Our loss of darkness obscures so much

I'm happy when I can count dozens of stars. I've seen a vestige of the picture above on dark nights in the country but nothing like what the picture shows. I can't imagine seeing this with my naked eye. It would be worth it to far for the opportunity.

[pscot]

2. At least we know it's still there

and there are places where it may still be seen. So much of what we've lost is simply gone forever, never to be seen again by any human now living.