Pleiades Star Cluster (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So I’m sitting in a session at Realm Makers 2015, called “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Philosophy and Theology as Found in Science Fiction and Fantasy.” Which is a pretty fascinating topic, really.
And the speaker, Steve Laube (both an agent at Steve Laube Agency and editor at Enclave Press) mentioned something I’ve heard before, but it’s not the kind of thing that gets old.
Time travel is possible. Just go out and look at the night sky.
Every time we look at the stars, we are time traveling, we are looking at the light of the past. The light we see coming through our atmosphere was emitted years ago, sometimes hundreds of years ago, by stars too far to see right away. Sometimes we see light from stars which have already died, like a letter arriving too late.
The Pleiades is a lovely constellation which appears frequently in one of my works in progress, Shard & Shield. I like to find it in the sky, when I’m in a place which hasn’t been utterly destroyed by light pollution. The light we see has traveled 440 years to reach Earth and our eyes.
How intriguing is that?
There’s a lot of beauty in the cosmos and the great parts of creation we never see. Two years ago I shared a cool project which converts some of the dance of the heavenly bodies into something we can experience more easily here on earth. Neat stuff.
