From: John Beckett 

"Geo"  wrote in message news::
> Yeah but signs of man only reach about 100 light years from earth, a
> distance that should be considered extremely local.

Have you read about the "birth star" concept? Sorry to be quoting
Richard Dawkins again ... I might switch to Somerset Maugham for a change.

Here's an excerpt from an article in which Dawkins encourages us to oppose
astrology. The "birth star" idea is below.

http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Article
s/1995-12romance_in_stars.shtml

Name any year in history and there will be a star up there whose light
gives you a glimpse of something happening that very year. Whatever the
year of your birth, somewhere up in the night sky you could find your birth
star (or stars, for the number is proportional to the third power of your
age). Its light enables you to look back and see a thermonuclear glow that
heralds your birth. A pleasing conceit, but that is all. Your birth star
will not deign to tell anything about your personality, your future or your
sexual compatibilities. The stars have larger agendas, in which the
preoccupation's of human pettiness do not figure.

Your birth star, of course, is yours for only this year. Next year you must
look to another shell of stars, one light year more distant. Think of this
expanding bubble as a radius of good news, the news of your birth,
broadcast steadily outwards. In the Einsteinian universe in which most
physicists now think we live, nothing can in principle travel faster than
light. So, if you are 50 years old, you have a personal news sphere of 50
light years radius. Within that sphere it is in principle possible
(obviously not in practice) for news of your existence to have permeated.

Outside that sphere you might as well not exist - in an Einsteinian sense
you do not exist. Older people have larger existence spheres than younger
people, but nobody's existence sphere extends to more than a tiny fraction
of the universe. The birth of Jesus may seem an ancient and momentous event
to us. But the news of it is actually so recent that, even in the most
theoretically ideal circumstances, it could in principle have been
proclaimed to less than one 200-million-millionth of the stars in the
universe.

John

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