A galaxy far, far away

Space, it's huge. That is an understatement. If you were to take a pebble from a beach once every hundred years, until that beach is empty. That would give you some kind of idea of the vastness of all the stars that fill the sky.

The Hubble is the most sophisticated telescope man has ever built. With it we have seen such beautiful images that we otherwise could have never seen from Earth. So in 2004, some astronomers found it a bit odd that for eleven days they were going to point the Hubble to a patch of space that had nothing in it. Completely black. Or so we thought. The video below is what became of that image we took.

You feel small? Did you question your existence? Did you see the last galaxy? The object that is 10,000 galaxies away, the furthest thing that we have ever seen, that is traveling faster than the speed of light?

That existed thirteen billion years ago? That's right, that galaxy is no longer there, at least not in that position of space, it was there thirteen billion years ago. It took the light from that part of the universe thirteen billion years to reach Earth. Light, that we assumed wasn't there when we looked at that part of space.

How wrong we are about so many, many things. We fumble, we stumble, we confuse, and destroy.

But sometimes, just sometimes. We get things awesomely right.

Here's to humanity. May its successes outweigh its misfortunes.