The Doppelganger Effect

I have just witnessed a great mind talking about the effect the Night Sky had on him as a kid.  He went into depth on his fascination of that sky and what lay in it.  He was to become one of the worlds prominent astrophysicists.   As a kid I too had a great fascination for that night sky and many fine night's you'd find me sneaking out of the house after everyone had gone to bed and just lying on the back lawn watching the Milky Way pass me by.

That lead to a fascination with that sky, and a dream as a boy of being an astronomer.  If circumstances had of been different I'd probably have been one, but life interceded.  But what brought all this back to me too was a post in Facebook where all my ex Navy mates were talking about the starlit nights out at sea, especially in the tropics where the sky was so clear.  I too spent countless nights star gazing for hours (part of the job then) and old names of constellations and star/planets flooded back.

But what of that sky??  With the advent of satellites, voyaging spacecraft, and the Hubble Telescope we are unlocking the unknown of that sky.  No we will never unlock it all, but we will go someway towards opening different perspectives on objects we always considered dots in the sky.  They say knowledge is Power but there is so much Power in the Universe we will never ever gain full knowledge of Everything.

And that's what the sky is - Everything.  Everything we already know, everything we can dream about, and more importantly Everything we don't and probably never will understand or know.  Stargazers are the ones that can perceive a possible Everything.  Earthlings (the ones that walk around looking at the ground and not up) largely have no interest in Everything.  But if you offer them the possibility that they too will gain new knowledge by offering them dreams come true, then they too will take notice, and maybe wake up to the fact that on Earth they may have one or two doppelgangers, in the Universe they may have billions! Is that a scary thought?

So Ladies and Gents, Take that starry night by storm and dream.  Think of Everything, stretch your mind, tackle your perception and just try and revel in the Hugeness of the Sky and the minuteness of the speck on a planet that is you. But don't feel overawed by your size in this.  Your mind judges how big an effort this is and the mind is limitless, as is the sky and your perceptions.  If you don't dream it, you won't experience it.