There are so many little things about gravity that we take for granted. If you take it away, a lot of things become tougher. The common discussion points are how you lose bone density, muscle mass, you get taller, and increased risk of herniated disks. But there are a lot of day to day things that are tough too. Sleeping while having no concept of up and down, exercising without weights, eating, writing, and drinking. Generally astronauts would have to drink from bags because you simply couldn’t have a cup of water. The lack of gravity would have the water...
Lucky me. I’m taking a vacation next week. The same week that New Horizons will make it’s flyby of Pluto. It just means I get to watch from the road, from the outside in for once. I’m still looking forward to it, but with a cup of coffee and a national park as my venue, rather than a newsroom media call. At any rate, my posting will continue as I still feel like my blog-a-day rationale is beneficial for me as a writer (and hopefully for you as the reader), though I might mix in a few of my own photos from a...
Stars are far apart, especially compared to the everyday distances in human experience. The fastest a human being has ever travelled is just shy of 40 Km/s, and even at that incredible speed it would take 30,000 years to reach the closest star. That is an incredible distance no matter how you slice it. Taking it a step further, most stars in the sky are 20-200 times further away, and that’s just the population of stars we can see. So if we go beyond and talk about galaxies and the distances between them, we are literally talking astronomical quantities. Yet even with...
