Going to Mars

As you may know, we have successfully landed crafts on Mars to explore the planet. In fact between Russia and the USA, we've tried many, many times to get to Mars. We now have things up there testing the soil and rocks and such. But do everyday people really know just how far out we have gone.

Well, a good comparison is the moon. Everyone can go out and look at the moon, check it out in a telescope, follow it through the night sky. But how far is the moon? The moon is about 1/4 of a million miles away ... that's 250,000 MILES!! Kinda like circling the earth about 10 times over. It takes about 3 days just to get to the moon.

Mars, however, is about 40 million miles away, depending on where it is in it's orbit! That's like circling the earth around 1600 times over. It takes like 6 months to get there ... and that's going about 10,000 mph! It's insane!! How the hell can we do this shit??

Another, more simple way of grasping this distance is by measuring the AU's, or astronomical units. An AU is about the distance from earth to the sun, therefore the distance from the earth to the sun is 1AU. It's an easier way to look at distance and somehow get your head around it. So if we look at AU's, then the distance from the earth to the moon is about .00264 AU's. That's 2 hundreths of the distance from what it is to the sun. Now going to Mars is about 1.45 AU's in distance. that's like going to the sun and continuing halfway as long again. Imagine going to the sun, and when you get there, you still have about a third of the way to go yet.

I just can't believe what we are able to do as humans. I could spend my entire life devoted to making something spectacular and even if I had all the resources, all the money, all the time in the world, I probably would be lucky if I could build a craft that could fly for about 10 seconds before crashing back down to earth from its maximum altitude of 20 feet. And yet we've landed on the moon, made telescopes that are out in orbit right now viewing hundred of light years away, and we have stuff on Mars.

And somehow, someway, when you look at what man can do, and then pan out to see the whole earth, then the moon, then mars, then the solar system, the the local area, then the little arm of the milky way that we reside on, then the whole galaxy, and then the known universe ... to which there may be several universes. Suddenly you realize, we ain't done squat by going to Mars. If fact, you could take everything that every man has ever done in human history, and it don't mean squat. Anything and everything that we've done could be wiped out in a millisecond and not leave one trace of evidence that we even ever existed. We are navel lint ... at best!!

So all you out there just continue on your way climbing that corporate ladder, driving your new cars, and sipping on your Starbucks, while racking up unheard totals on your credit cards as you take your little princess to ballet class. I'll be here, like always, staring up at the sky, with My trusty dog by my side, getting in-tune with the fact that nothing really matters and wondering what in the hell are we doing here!!