Paphos People

Look up to the Stars

Look up to the stars was the theme of a Physics lesson when I was at school in the sixties. We had an excellent young trainee teacher who was on a three month course in the field so to speak, who fired an idea into your head and left the rest to your imagination.
“You cannot imagine anything without an end, because everything in our world has an ultimate conclusion but the universe goes on forever” was what he said in his first lesson.
That single statement made me start to try and imagine eternity and what that means, mind boggling stuff to a twelve year old.
After a week of thinking about that, he followed it up with “There are millions of stars in the known Universe, which are many times larger than our Sun. Each one with its own group of planets like ours, so do you think that we are the only planet with a life system in the whole conglomeration? And I’m only talking about the fraction of the Universe that we know about.”
Another week of deep thought and apprehension followed. The threat which that could mean to human life and indeed all life on our insignificant little planet from some unknown alien force was frightening.
As if that wasn’t enough to cope with, the next weeks offering was about the vast distances that any alien life form, friendly or not, would take many lifetimes to cover. So it would take many generations of aliens to reach us, let alone find us. Unless of course they had discovered the secret of conquering time travel but that was extremely unlikely, because if they had discovered that secret, why hadn’t anybody come back from the future to tell us about it.
I wonder what ever happened to Mr Hawkins.
At about this time the first series of Star Trek appeared on the TV and seemed to answer all these questions. Warp Factor Six seemed to take the Starship Enterprise vast distances in seconds, but what effect did that type of travel have on time? Did they return to Earth after their five year mission, warp factoring all over the universe, only to find that they hadn’t even left yet? Pure fiction I’m afraid.
As time went on and I grew older, the thoughts, probabilities and possibilities of the vastness of the universe became less important because they didn’t affect the slow process of growing up. Although the whole theory of time travel was firmly locked in my subconscious mind, it didn’t hold me back in my personal quest to be a grown up.
All of which brings me to the statement:
‘LOOK UP AT THE STARS - NOT DOWN AT YOUR FEET’
Which I think must mean ‘be aware of your own shortcomings but keep your feet firmly on the ground whilst looking as far ahead into the future as is humanly possible.’
What do you think?