>>> Part 2 of 2...

everyday life such odds are called compelling. Worlds are
precious.

Before us is us is the Cosmos on the grandest scale we know.
We are in the realm of the nebulae, eight billion light-
years from earth, halfway to the edge of the known universe.
A Galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars-billions upon
billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.
Within a galaxy are stars and worlds and, it may be, a
proliferation of living things and intelligent beings
and space faring civilizations.

There are some hundred billion galaxies, each with, on the
average, a hundred billion stars. In all the galaxies, there
are perhaps as many planets as stars, ten billion trillion.
In the face of such overpowering numbers, what is the
likelihood that only one ordinary star, the Sun, is
accompanied by an inhabited planet? Why should we, tucked
away in some forgotten corner of the Cosmos, be so
fortunate?  To me, it seems far more likely that the
universe is brimming over with life. But we humans do not
yet know. From eight billion light-years away we are hard
pressed to find even the cluster in which our Milky Way
Galaxy is embedded.
But presently our journey takes us to what our astronomers
on Earth like to call the local group of galaxies. Several
million light-years across, it is composed of some twenty
constituent galaxies. It is a sparse and obscure and
unpretentious cluster. One of these galaxies is M31, seen
from Earth in the constellation Andromeda. Like other spiral
galaxies, it is a huge pinwheel of stars and dust. M31 has
two small satellites, dwarf elliptical galexies bound to it
by gravity. That is two billion light-years from Earth.
Beyond M31 is another, very similar galaxy, that is now
forty thousand light -years from home. I aliens are to find
us they must direct there course to the remote outskirts of
the galaxy, to an obscure locale near the edge of a distant
spiral arm.
Our overwhelming impression, even between the spiral arms,
is of stars streaming by us. A vast array of exquisitely
self-luminous stars, some flimsy as a soap bubble and so
large that they could contain ten thousand Suns or a
trillion Earths; others the size of a small-town and a
hundred trillion times denser than lead. Systems are
commonly double, two stars orbiting one another.

But there is a continuous gradation from triple systems
through loose clusters of a few dozen stars to the great
globular clusters, resplendent with a million suns.
So Alien Find me if you can.

The above description is not the whole of the Cosmos.
I have only given you just a glimpse of the vastness of
what's out there.

In an old series of Star Trek, their mission is to find
Earth, the planet that they originally came from.
That was not just fiction. It was based on the fact of
the Cosmos being so vast, and it will also be a fact that
Aliens will not just come to us, they will have to find
us first, amongst the many trillions of the bits and
pieces that make up the cosmos.

That's enough rambling on for me, it makes you think don't
it.

I will continue the series so see you soon or as Arnold
used to say "I'll be back"

73's Peter ZS2ABF.
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[End of Message #265006 from ZS2ABF]

... Peter is located:  Lake Simcoe,Ontario,Canada
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