In this lesson, you’ll learn how to truly enjoy your journey to your desired reality. With a few steps, you’ll see how to maintain a state of happiness as you manifest your goals. As you move through any given day, you’ll find yourself “being in the right place at the right time,” so that you remain consistently happy with your current environment.
When was the last time you looked up at the stars?
Our brains are remarkably complex objects with a hundred billion
neurons, a quadrillion connections, and we still know very little about
how this organic super computer operates. But we do know the human brain
is the most complicated thing we have yet discovered. It gives us the
power to form language and culture, consciousness, the idea of self, the
ability to learn, and understand the universe and reflect on our place
within it. We even have an inbuilt “model of gravity“, which is pretty useful.
This may sound fanciful, but the reality is almost every element
found on Earth was created in the burning core of a star, all the stuff
that makes up life on Earth, therefore our bodies are made from
stardust. NASA have studied stardust extensively, and you can read more
about their research on their official website. A NASA stardust canister is pictured above.
This is more speculative theory than a fact, but several branches of
mathematics, quantum mechanics, and astrophysics have all come to
similar conclusions: our universe is just one of many and we actually
exist in a ‘multiverse’.
Different calculations provide different numbers for how many galaxies there are in the observable universe
– that is the part of the universe we can see from Earth with our
current technology, there maybe many more but they are simply to far
away for our telescopes to detect. Using data from the Hubble Telescope
astronomers have calculated there are likely to be around 170 billion
galaxies in the observable universe.
Scientists searching for extraterrestrial life focus on “Goldilocks Planets“;
these are planets which fall into a star’s habitable zone. Planet Earth
seems to have exactly the right conditions for life to exist – its
distance from the Sun means the temperature is right, water can exist as
a liquid solid and a gas, and there are the right combination of
chemical compounds available to build complex life forms. Other planets
thought to have similar features are known as Goldilocks planets.
Our Sun is essential to us, the centre of our Solar System, and our
source of light and energy, but it is just one of many, many stars that
make up our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Current estimates suggest there
are around 400 billion stars sharing our galaxy. The artist’s concept above shows what a a dust disk around a baby star could well look like.
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
is a project to discover whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in
the universe and how we may contact extraterrestrial species. The search
includes looking for life on other planets and moons. For instance,
some of Jupiter’s moons (such as Io) are promising places to look for
evidence of primitive life, but the search for extraterrestrial life
includes scientific research on Earth.
In 1990, as part of the spacecraft’s ongoing mission, Voyager 1 turned
its camera back on our home planet and took a picture. This became known
as The Pale Blue Dot. Seen from 6 billion
kilometres away, the Earth appears as a tiny blue speck in the depths of
space. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who first suggested the idea of the
photograph, noted, “From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not
seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider
again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”
The Voyager Program launched two spacecraft, Voyager
1 and Voyager 2, in 1977. The probes explored the planets and moons of
the outer Solar System over several decades and are now continuing their
mission to travel through the heliosphere at the edge of our Solar
System and continue to voyage into interstellar space.
Neutron stars spin incredibly quickly and are also incredibly dense. It
is estimated, if you could collect a tablespoon of matter from the
centre of a neutron star, it would weigh about one billion tons.
Neutron stars are thought to be the fastest spinning
objects in the universe. Pulsars are a particular type of neutron star
that emits a beam of radiation which can be observed as a pulse of light
as the star spins. The rate of this pulse allows astronomers to measure
the rotation.
Venus is the slowest rotating planet in our Solar System, so slow it
takes longer to fully rotate than it does to complete its orbit. This
means Venus has days that last longer than its years. It’s also home to
one of the most inhospitable environments imaginable, with constant
electronic storms, high CO2 readings, and it’s shrouded by clouds of
sulfuric acid.
Most of the planets in the Solar System spin on an axis similar to the
Sun’s; slight tilts in a planet’s axis causes seasons as different parts
become slightly closer or further from the sun during their orbit. Uranus
is an exceptional planet in many ways, not least because it spins
almost completely on its side in relation to the Sun. This results in
very long seasons – each pole gets around 42 Earth years of continuous
summer sunlight, followed by a wintry 42-year period of darkness.
Uranus’s northern hemisphere enjoyed its last summer solstice in 1944
and will see in the next winter solstice in 2028.
Olympus Mons on Mars is the tallest mountain on any of
the planets of the Solar System. The mountain is a gigantic shield
volcano (similar to volcanoes found in the Haiiwain Islands) standing at
26 kilometres tall and sprawling 600 kilometres across. To put this
into scale, this makes the mountain almost three times the height of
Mount Everest.
Whilst the Earth and the other planets within our solar system orbit
around the Sun, the Sun itself is orbiting around the centre of our
galaxy, the Milky Way. It takes the Sun 225 million years to perform a
complete circuit of the galaxy. The last time the Sun was in its current
position in the galaxy the super-continent Pangaea was just about
starting to break apart and early dinosaurs were making an appearance.
Astronomers have discovered the largest known diamond in our galaxy, it’s a massive lump of crystallised diamond called BPM 37093, otherwise known as Lucy after The Beatles’ song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Found
50 light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus, Lucy is about
25,000 miles across, so much larger then planet Earth, and weighs in at a
massive 10 billion-trillion-trillion carats.
Sagittarius B is a vast molecular cloud of gas and dust floating near
the centre of the Milky Way, 26,000 light-years from Earth,
463,000,000,000 kilometres in diameter and, amazingly, it contains
10-billion-billion-billion litres of alcohol. The vinyl alcohol
in the cloud is far from the most flavoursome tipple in the universe,
but it is an important organic molecule which offers some clues how the
first building blocks of life-forming substances are produced.
Cosmic background radiation is the afterglow and heat of the Big Bang,
the momentous event that kick-started our universe 13.7 billion years
ago. This cosmic echo exists throughout the universe, and amazingly we
can use an old-fashioned television set to catch a glimpse of it. When a
television is not tuned to a station you can see the black and white
fuzz and clacking white noise, around 1% of this interference is made up
cosmic background radiation – the afterglow of creation.
