1969: man lands on the moon 

2012: Mars Curiosity lands on The Red Planet

if there was one specialty i've been truly and genuinely interested/in awe of, i think it would have to be astronomy. there's just an undeniable relationship between astronomy and that stupid question: who am i? what does my life mean? to me the idea of astronomy is so intricately linked to so many things that are important to me: religion, sense of purpose, sense of identity 

everybody knows that God has created a universe that is so vast we cannot even begin to comprehend 

to me astronomy is one step closer to understanding, getting a grasp 

on what God has created and who God is 

i've never really dismissed the idea of life on other planet

i find it extremely plausible given such little we know about our galaxy, even less so the universe(s) 

i think one of the things i love and hate about life is attempting to wrap my head around how huge everything is. how insignificant i am but more so how enormous everything else is. i find the idea of a planet suspended in mid-air (super layman speak) preposterous and yet it's the core of my being. i find the speed of light ridiculous and yet it governs how we live every single day. 

i find the enormity of everything in astronomy so damn farfetched and incomprehensible 

but that it is real 

makes the moments when i stop to think about these things feel as if 

my life is not real 

dream-like 

almost like i'm suspended in mystique as much as the earth rotates on its own 

like we are merely a figment of God's imagination 

i'm not sure why but this week has been filled with a lot of astronomy, most prominently, the knowledge that given how far away stars are from us, it would take thousands of years for light to travel from the star to earth i.e. it would take thousands of years for this light to enter our camera lenses and our eyeballs that would enable us to see the star, by which time the star might be dead, collapsed 

this afternoon i told Gus, if someone lived on a planet thousands, millions of lightyears away and established vision of Earth right now, he/she/it would see us eating in this restaurant, my club sandwich and your nasi goreng, talking, being cold because of the air-con, talking about this. 

by then he & i would be ashes returned to the ground, into soil that may not exist any longer. we would be dead. but an image of us may live on somewhere else in this universe. how beautiful is that?