Did you ever see that guy that balances a chair on his chest? He has to get that chair to be perfectly still and then and only then, can he get it to balance perfectly. When we are tired we lay down and sleep, laying in our beds and not moving, for the most part, unless we have one of those restless nights. Even our pet fish might look like he is perfectly still sometimes in the tank. I hate to tell everyone this, but we are being deceived by nature. That chair along with the fish and even us in bed, are moving at incredible speeds through space. The earth is also rotating. This rotation speed is 25,000 miles in 24 hours. This means we are spinning at better than 1,000 per hour. Are you starting to get dizzy yet? Why is it that some people get sick on the merry go round yet stand on the earth and spinning at this furious speed doesn't bother them?

The solar system is moving at a speed of about 50 light years per million years. We are headed toward the constellation Hercules. The entire galaxy is orbiting it's center and makes one orbit about every 250 million years. Our entire galaxy, the Milky Way is moving at a speed of 370 miles per second through space. Folks we are really moving, there is no such thing as being still, only the perception of it. If a rocket was launched into space and traveled to another galaxy, it could not return to the same spot it came from. That spot would have moved and that must be included in the navigation calculations for the return trip. Our entire way of life is converged with speed and yet, most of us never think about this.

If we get on a jet and head for a destination that is in the same direction that the earth is rotating, are we really traveling at the speed the plane is going? The earth is rotating under us? But if we really think about it, we are like someone in a train. If the train is moving at 60 miles per hour and we jump up in the air, do we get smashed against the back of the car as the floor speeds by? No we don't. The train takes us along with it, it is a much larger body then us and attracts us to it. That plane flying is in the same position as we were in the train, it is attracted to the earth in such a way that it travels along with it, and it's speed is added to the rotation giving us forward progress. As we get further and further out into space we can break the earth's attraction to us, but for most of us, it's life as usual.

Sometimes, as we know, this attraction can cause us real problems. Just look at how many times we have been hit by meteors in the past few million years. Since we live on an active planet is is hard to see all the impacts since they are filled in or covered over quite quickly in geological terms. If the earth was a barren planet, it would look like the moon with all the craters and pock marks that go along with hits and eruptions. So here we are on a world that is hurtling through space at incredible speeds and on the way, it is being hit by massive rocks. Makes you wonder how any of us survive. As unusual as this looks, it seems to be the norm for galaxies, stars and planets along with all their comets, asteroids and who knows what else?

Wait, there are other bodies that are traveling through space that we haven't discussed. These rogue stars or bodies, are not part of any solar system They just speed across space on their own and if they are unlucky enough to encounter another body and were drawn to it, both would be destroyed unless one of them is so huge that it could absorb the impact. The discovery of these rare bodies is quite recent, but was talked about in science fiction literature for quite awhile. It's funny when you think about how many times things that were talked about in science fiction have come true. I remember seeing a movie many years ago about this subject. I think it was called, When Worlds Collide. It was about a couple of planet size bodies that traveled through space and came so close to the earth that they pulled it apart.

Can you imagine if this ever came true, we would have no way, right now, of stopping this from happening, if the object was planet sized, even if it was a small planet. If a star, or planet, ever came this way, it wouldn't even have to hit us, just get fairly near us. The distance would depend on it's size. The heavens are like a huge, dangerous trap. We know of a lot of objects that are extremely dangerous because of the energy they put out or because of their gravitational pull, but there may be many more objects out there that we know nothing about. When we really begin to explore space, if we survive that long, we will have to be extremely careful.

Space is somewhat like our bodies. It has hot spots, spaces between stars and planets and everything is moving. Our bodies are composed of cells with spaces between them and everything is moving. Could space just be the inside of some giant live being? I don't really think so, but it is an interesting thought. We may not be the only universe out there. Scientists are constantly talking about other dimensions. Could there also be other universes of much larger or smaller sizes? Could an entire universe exist in a drop of water but is too small to see with our current instruments and could we be just a tiny part of some mega universe out there?