Seeing Stars

The Washington Post reports today: “Astronomers have spotted a cataclysmic explosion that marked the death of a huge, distant star in a blast five times as bright and powerful as any they had seen previously. They said yesterday that a similar fate may be imminent for a star in Earth’s galactic neighborhood.

“The size and energy of the newly recorded blast, 240 million light-years away, have already begun to transform scientific understanding of how especially large stars explode, and have left awestruck researchers concerned — and a little excited — about what might happen to the similarly enormous and unstable star closer to home.”

Was this caused by global warming?

Well, if you buy into the media hype, almost everything bad that happens in the galaxy is caused by the greedy narcissism of man. Exploding stars, melting polar ice caps, shorter winters, etc.

What if something else was happening to Earth?  Something bigger than man-made waste? Something like an exploding star in our galaxy?

What if the Sun decided to wake up and just get hotter? What would we do then? Try a cap-and-trade system with that heavenly body?

There are limits to what the government can do. In the big scheme of things, our influence is really quite small.

It amuses me how we human beings really believe that we run the world. We may decide how we treat one another, but the world runs itself, in concert with a bigger truth that is way beyond our power and our influence.

Astronomers know that there is a bigger stage out there and that we are a bit player. In my view, the human imperative is to explore and to learn and to seek greater truth. And that truth goes beyond global warming, whatever the media hype might dictate.