Although Monday's solar eclipse was a huge dud in Prince George, thanks to the clouds, not to worry. There's a much better light show coming exactly 27 years from today.
In the early evening of Monday, Aug. 22, 2044, more than 99 per cent of the sun on the western horizon of Prince George will be blotted out by the moon. For those looking for totality, it'll be available in McBride for about 45 seconds. The two-minute experience of the moon fully eclipsing the sun, with nothing visible but the gorgeous corona, will be available in Fort St. John, Dawson Creek, Edmonton and Calgary.
In the cosmic scheme of time, that's less than the blink of an eye from now.
And in the cosmic scheme of space, there's nothing like a solar eclipse to remind humanity how puny we are in the universe.
Solar and lunar eclipses were regular occurences for hundreds of millions of years before humans evolved on Earth and they will continue for hundreds of millions of years after the last human remains - and everything Homo Sopiens ever build - are nothing more than fossils.
The moon and the sun care not whether there is a conscious audience - or even if there is life at all on Earth - for their frequent ballet of light.
Monday's eclipse was a stark reminder that beyond this planet, massive forces exists across time and space that are beyond the imagination of all but our most brilliant physicists. Whether one has faith in God or a Creator, both the devout and the atheist alike can agree we are ridiculously small and insignificant creatures before the majesty of the universe.
Turns out we are small creatures even on this planet.
The largest manmade explosion in history was the Tsar Bomba, a Soviet hydrogen bomb test in 1961 that was about 1,500 times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Tsar Bomba, however, is nowhere near the largest explosion ever seen on Earth.
Asteroids are believed to have collided regularly with Earth in its earliest days, billions of years ago. More recently, about 66 millions years ago, the 15-kilometre in diameter Chicxulub asteroid slammed into the Gulf of Mexico at about 20 kilometres per second. That explosion, according to scientists, would have been about 10 billion times as powerful as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The aftermath of that incredible collision caused a mass extinction of a majority of the species on Earth at that time, including the dinosaurs.
And where that rock came from could even be more spectacular. Many scientists now believe it originated in something called the Oort Cloud on the extreme outskirts of the solar system, roughly one to three light years away. The theory goes that matter in the Oort Cloud could be dislodged by the gravitational forces of other passing celestial bodies from time to time, casting those floating rocks towards the distant sun, where they eventually enter the planetary neighbourhood of the solar system and are seen as comets.
Furthermore, other scientists think the dinosaurs might have survived the Chicxulub explosion if the asteroid had hit deep ocean, instead of the relatively shallow water in Mexico's Yucaten peninsula. With so much debris and dust thrown into the atmosphere, the sun was blocked out around the world for years, eliminating food sources for most land-based animals.
On one hand, such forces at work in the universe able to alter Earth's history so dramatically make our lives, as individuals and as a species, ridiculously irrelevant. Yet another way of looking at it is to embrace our relationship to one another, as a species and as individuals, and the brief time we have together with one another on this tiny planet.
Those relationships are nothing at all in the vastness of time and space but in the present reality, they're all we have. Life is infinitely bigger than anything we experience in a moment, a day or a lifetime.
Looking up from time to time is a good reminder of that.
-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
