what is it about looking through telescope and seeing with your own eyes
that appeals to you is it the challenge of you know sort of the technology and
finding it is it a more emotional or spiritual aspect or you know is it just
you know a fun way to spend time or what's the appeal it's fascinating to me
to be able to look at say for example you know two galaxies in the same field
of view knowing how far away they are their sizes and how how many stars are
made up of to be able to see that with the naked eye or a nebula from a star
that's exploded you know thousands of years ago and imagining what it might
look like now compared to what I see in the in the eyepiece because the light
has taken that long to reach us I think and you're looking back in time at all
of these objects so you're actually in a way there is some time travel involved
you were looking back in time at what they looked like at that point and and
imagining you know being close to them is seeing them with a naked eye there's
something magical about that and in some cases they're just outright spectacular
I mean if you're looking at Saturn or looking at the Jupiter you're looking at
a globular cluster which is you know hundreds of thousands of stars just
clump together and and if you if you have a really good viewing night you've
got a good good sized telescope and a decent eyepiece just the right size
eyepiece you can look at that and you can almost dive into the center of it so
the stars are very dense at the beginning and they spread out and fan
out at the end and it fills the entire eyepiece I mean it's like looking at
diamonds on a black surface it's like looking at jewels it's beautiful and
just that up that alone is one of the main reasons but there's also the like I
said the the fact that when you're looking at these these objects and how
many of them there are out there and and what the meaning is behind those the
fact that you have your own galaxy that you live in and these are other galaxies
where they're you know 10 maybe 10 times more stars than we have in ours and the
potential for intelligent life on these planets that might be there so you're
yeah it's and you're wondering if there might be something out there looking
back at you and your hometown had a telescope that's not unlike yours you
know so that could be could be amazing I asked you this not from analytical
point of view but just from a personal point of view do you think there are
others out there I'd like to go along with the Drake Equation possibility
which just given all of the elements that are in the universe are the same
ones that make up all of us and this planet and everything on it and those
elements are everywhere in the universe so if that's the case then if you'll
excuse the word logically there should be a mix of those elements on other
worlds that turned out to produce some form of life now whether or not it's
intelligent whether or not they've evolved beyond where we are or whether
or not that the same pace we are that all remains to be seen I don't know
exactly what those odds might be because you need this you need I think as
evolution the process you need more you need Cataclysm you need mass extinctions
in order to to generate these loops of evolution which might garner you the
life is of the dinosaurs are around for you know 150 200 million years they
never evolved to the point where they could you know have a starling recession
like this and we've only been around as mammals for five million years as
intelligent mammals so five million years because there was an extinction
event and we had several over the course of the of the years history but only now
do we have the opportunity to develop a intelligent life so there's to me it
seems like you have to have those out those evolutionary gaps in order for you
know for life to develop very quickly and radically so who knows if on those
other planets if you've got amoebas or plankton or something else flowing
around and and and that's it and that all those niches are filled and then it
doesn't go anywhere from there or if there's no comets or asteroids in our
solar system which I would guess there would be and the planet or gamma-ray
burst is that were there that those planets see if there's no mass
extinction will evolution carry those life forms to the point where they reach
intelligent life and how what that take so I think but by sheer
odds what is it every there are more stars out there than there are grains of
sand on every Beach on planet Earth I mean you wrap your header on that number
man that's got to be something going on