Everyone at the table was talking AI. I had contributed my latest opinion, compliments of TEDXVancouver. The man seated next to me was a man from Mars. Well, as close as a small-town girl like me was going to get to another planet. A physicist, I forget his name. He might be famous in his circles but to me that night he was the anecdote to the shrill aaaaeeee and iiiiyyyy sounds of the table chatter.
When you see the sun, you’re seeing it 8 and a half minutes later, he said. Stars have been sending light to us for hundreds and thousands of years. You never see where they truly are.
Pass the butter, nothing new here.
But imagine… imagine…, he continues, a whole universe, and this Earth of ours, at the tail end of the Milky Way, with every one of those stars with suns, and some suns so big that you could put the sun and the earth and the distance between them in one of them.
I googled that later.
He said, they’ve got planets too, possibly. About 50 years ago, they found there was yet another universe. And another galaxy. You know how many how many galaxies they calculate there are now?
I took another swig of my Cabernet. Well?
A sober estimate says 2 billion. And that the universe is expanding at the rate of 68km per second.
He lifted his glass and declared, Imagine blowing a bubble at that rate?
When I looked up at the stars that night (that’s a lie, I live in a city of locked doors at nightfall) but I imagine… imagine… vastness…
The TED talks and AI could have told me all the physicist did, but in the here and now, in this off-centre Earth of ours at the tail end of the Milky Way, my creative soul is quietened by the thought of how much could fit into that bubble before it popped.