Where The Hell is That Freaking Wormhole?

Do you know how many stars are there in night sky visible from earth? Innumerable was the answer till few days back. Now we have a number: 291 million!  I read this number in a popular science article recently. Scientists have enumerated the number of stars, both visible with naked eye and through powerful telescope combined. Of course this is a definitive number it may be +/- few hundred thousand. Frankly speaking, I was a bit disappointed by this number. I always had that ‘billions upon billions of stars’ line from cosmos in mind. ~0.3 billion fell too short of that number. But keep in mind this is the count based on the visibility permitted by our limited technologies. Billions of stars are still invisible from us due to some ‘space dust’. And forget about many more that we are never going to find out in our limited life span.

The universe…. Will we ever able to comprehend everything out there? The laws governing it, the life forms, the language of life, the technology…. and everything. I don’t think we humans, with a three pound of fatty tissue between our ears, will ever be able to understand anything at all other than little bit more than what we already know. We need a more advanced version of ourselves. Homo sapiens V.2 with improved cerebral capacity and processing power for that. A version who can device technologies that can transport us far beyond the speed of light, that can extend the quality or our life span far beyond we mortal beings currently have, that can device a way of life which beats even the very best imagination or our most creative fiction writers. I hope they would still carry the 3 billion-nucleotide code that we carry around, at least a significant level of similarity. Hope all the scientific research we are doing now would contribute at least a bit to the preservation and emancipation of humanity and human culture.

We just finished watching the season finale of ‘Extant’, a beautiful and very imaginative science fiction thriller. We got ourselves into this science fiction zone and decided to watch the king of all sci-fi ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ once again. Just rented it from amazon and going to get on to the couch with a bowl of potato chips (read as ‘ banana chips’). It is funny that the movie was released in 1968 (an year before moon landing) and was depicted as the story happening in a much advance future circa:2001. It is now 13 years past 2001 and the human Jupiter mission part of the movie still remain futuristic. We humans have reached just till the moon. A feat we achieved 45 years back. What we have been doing in these years. Waiting for another cold war to get us to Mars or Europa or distant planetary systems? And where the hell is that freaking wormhole?