Queen, the legendary music band, said it with their song, Its a kind of magic.
When I see all the magic around me, I wonder why we are so blind to it as a species. We are part of the cosmic dust. Everything on Earth is because of the Sun, from the fossil fuel we use to build our great machines of peace and war to the carrots and roses we grow in our gardens. The Earth has a magnetic field to repel external threat and an ozone layer to protect us from the very Sun that gives us life. The Sun’s Heliosphere or the solar wind, encompasses our entire solar system to repel external threat like intergalactic debris. Without it, we’d be long gone. The space debris we get in spite of the solar wind is only a tiny, minuscule portion of the intergalactic traffic.
Yet, it all hangs in delicate balance. Astrophysicists say the sphere is diminishing, leaving the solar system open to attack.
The sun’s rays on our skin gives us vitamin D. Yet, too much of the ultra violet rays will give us skin cancer. The sun gives us light, particles, everything we need to sustain life. Yet, a solar flare or a solar storm can toast the planet.
We are cocooned within the warmth and life giving embrace of our sun which is already in its mid life. One day, it will grow in size, the hydrogen in its core will burn out the helium and it will turn into a white dwarf because its too small a star to go supernova. Then, our Sun will slowly fade away and disappear into the night of space, reduced to the size of a moon. It will burn this world down before it dies. But that could be five to six billion years away.
Astrophysicists say that by then, we’d have left the planet. They reckon that we are already on our way to Jupiter and Pluto and seeing far into deep space.
Considering that we are seriously into space exploration only for the last fifty years, in billions of years, we would have spread out. If we last that long.
And yet, here we are today, basking in the Sun’s golden glory, able to enjoy the fruits of its labour, living a miracle, definitely seeing things our ancestors did not see and escaping the fate of this world a few billion years from now.
Are we enjoying this magic? Are we even aware of it? Have we not taken it for granted? Aren’t we worried about pesky little things instead of wondering, even for a moment, how it all came to be? And more importantly, how it will all turn out? Here’s what makes me jump out of bed in the morning, what’s the next chapter like? The cosmic story spins on, a never ending saga.
Wow! Its a kind of magic! Love, Vadhan
