==JAPAN: KM== [Contemplation]

Some of the stars you look at tonight probably don't even exist anymore. Are they just something you are imagining? Is a black hole just empty darkness or is it a tunnel-gate into unimaginable new worlds? Have you ever thought of that? We are inclined to think of the universe as the space where there are a lot of stars, the earth, the moon, the sun and so on. However, if someone asks us how far the universe spreads and what is there behind it, can we answer the question? No. We can't say anything and we know nothing. Lately some space scientists have advocated various theories about the limits of the universe, but they couldn't convince everyone in the world. Now we cannot go and see the limits by any means, so it is an unknown existence that is beyond our understanding.
I have been interested in the universe since I was 10, when my father bought me a book about stars, especially constellations. Four years later, I got an astronomical telescope as my birthday present from my parents. That was the happiest day of that year. During that period of time, I used the telescope every night. In the summer I got my parents to take me to the highlands in Nagano Prefecture just for watching the stars. At the age of 15 when I lay down on the grass and looked up at the night view, a strange idea suddenly occurred to me. "What is the UNIVERSE?" The next day, I went to the library to inquire further into the universe and read many magazines about it, but I couldn't get much concrete understanding after all. Instead, I became even more conscious of its great dimension.
First, we should understand that we can see only a "past" thing when we look into space as the light of the stars we watch is a past phenomenon and we never can see the present. What is this principle? Light travels at enormous speed. It is going at a speed of about 300,000,000 meters per second. As you may know, this distance is roughly equal to seven and half rounds of the earth. By the way, to give a similar example, sound has a speed like light does. If lightning struck a place which was 331.5 meters away from you, you could hear the thunder a second after you watched the lightning. If you shout from a mountain, you might hear your voice echoing again and again as it is reflected by other mountains. The speed of sound causes these phenomena. Light is the same. If you could see a man who is quite a distance away from you, say 300,000,000 meters, the man you would be seeing right now is the man who lived one second ago. The man who is one meter ahead of you is "one from the past" who existed 0.0000000033 seconds ago. However, we don't take any notice of that, but the speed of light must not be out of question when we watch something within the scale of the universe. Light travels in about 1.28 seconds between the earth and the moon and in about 8 minutes from here to the sun, so we can see the moon which existed 1.28 seconds ago and the sun of 500 seconds ago. Surprisingly, one of the stars in the Swan is 1,800 light-years away from the earth. 1,800 light-years means 1.71 x 1018 meters. We can only see the star which shone 1,800 years ago. Maybe the star has already become extinct.
Secondly, there really are mysterious bodies called "Black Holes" in the universe. Light can't escape from them because of the tremendous gravitation the Black Holes have. Here is an interesting theory. A scientist says that we can go to other universes through the black holes and that "Time Machine" will take us to a past world or future world as we pass through it. Such a story is no more than a hypothesis because it is actually impossible for us to go into the black hole because we will be squashed and killed by the strong pressure before we enter it. However, we are given many positive proofs which show the existence of the black hole by the latest astronomical telescopes and the progress of the observational techniques.
On a clear night, please look up at the sky. The night views are "out of this world" and will probably make you feel happier. Next, I want you to imagine the relation between the universe and human beings. Here I gave only two examples out of many, but you would realize that man is by far the smaller, compared with the universe, and it is true that we are one part of the universe no matter how big it is. Human beings don't have the power to charge or break up the universe but rather the mind--the love, hopes and dreams necessary to live happily. All that we can do is make a world where everyone can live peacefully. I think so. That must be the true mission we must strive to carry out as a part of this grand universe.

COMMENT Sometimes we think of ourselves as the most important existence in the universe and behave like that. We have a humanistic idea at the back of our mind and tend to forget the idea that we are in the universe.
As I read this essay, I thought we must abandon the humanistic idea and remember that "We are one part of the universe and don't have power to change or break up the universe but rather the mind." The human beings are too smaller than the big universe after all.

Kimitaka Ohyama