Celebrating the New Year with Life, the Universe, and Everything

Important Fact from Galactic History, Number One:  (reproduced from the Siderial Daily Mentioner’s Book of Popular Galactic History)                               

The night sky over the planet Krikkit is the least interesting sight in the entire Universe.

(Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything)[1]

Have you ever wondered how the stars would look if viewed from another planet?  To stand on a distant world and look up at the depths, into space and back in time, and to see how these two look from that vastly different vantage point — there is a certain breathtaking quality in the thought.  It is an experience we try to imagine but cannot imagine quite accurately, as no human has ever seen that view.

Although the view from another planet, another solar system, another galaxy is a wondrous thing to imagine, for right now, all we have is our view from right here on planet Earth.  We stand here, in our little corner of the cosmos, and as we look up into space, there are certain familiar sights:  stars and planets named by our ancestors, constellations drawn on the night sky by their imaginations — a mural of artwork drawn in intricate detail by an invisible artist.  We see the universe (or, at least, a small section of it) from here and wonder what else is out there in all the vastness of all existence.  Our planet seems sometimes an insignificant place to be, perhaps as uninteresting as the night sky over the planet Krikkit, but it is our home.  It is from this place that we wonder and imagine and try to figure out what all of this (life, the universe, and everything) means.

The night sky over the planet Krikkit may be the least interesting sight in the entire Universe, but in this Universe, sometimes even the most uninteresting and simple places and phenomena hold great allure for those who seek to discover and derive understanding from the cosmos.  As this little planet continues to travel around our sun, may we value the little corner we have and continue our fascination with the far reaches of space — and hopefully, one day, when this planet has traveled around our sun a great many more times, we will know more about that vast abyss we see when we look up at the night sky.

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References

[1] Adams, Douglas.  Life, the Universe, and Everything.  From The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy omnibus edition.  New York:  Gramercy Books, an imprint of Random House, 1982, p. 326.

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