To Infinity and Beyond!

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Ryan O'Connor

So today I had my first astronomy lecture – PHYS1500 – at uni, and I was impressed.

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To start off with, the lecturer had put, on the overhead, a picture of Hoag’s Object. For those who don’t know what that is (and I think I can still count myself among you), it is apparently what’s called a ring galaxy, made up of a yellow-looking central star-cluster surrounded at a respectable distance by a ring of bluish-white stars. It looks, in summary, pretty damn awesome. This is the reason I have started astronomy; cause of the pretty pictures.

So the lecturer allows us to be graced by this picture of an outer galaxy for only a few minutes, before starting to show his slides, and his first words to us as a class are:

“Let’s understand the basics today. First up: Space is pretty big.”

How true. For the next hour, he proceeded to demonstrate how absolutely massive our solar system is, using small balls of blue-tack and tennis balls to represent the planetary bodies, throwing in the occasional joke (“So if we assumed that the Earth is the size of this tennis ball, we could say that Jupiter is roughly positioned on the Engineering Lawns, which is one point to the atheists  because no deity in their right mind puts anything on the Engineering Lawns.“) He showed the wide-eyed, captivated audience that our nearest stellar neighbor, Promixa Centauri, is in Canberra if we assume that our sun is tennis-ball-sized, barely even skimming over a political joke on the way, and assured us that nearly nothing exciting at all will happen during our lifetimes, astronomically speaking. Apparently, an astronomer’s idea of a joke is one that takes several billion years to get to the punch-line, but he may have only been joking. He also graced us with several moments of Morgan Freeman’s voice.

In short, this lecturer made my day.

A lot of the lecturers in the university do their jobs much like the Average Joe does theirs. They turn up, sit at their desk, drone about something to a crowd of people they’re not impressed with, and are happy to go home at the end of the day. There’s no enthusiasm, no pizzazz. They could, in other words, bore the buttocks off a baboon. Those lecturers are the ones who have people sleeping during their lectures, or who people always refer to with a sigh. (You know what I mean: “Oh, I’ve got Concentrated Boredom with Bloggs now.” *Sigh*) Not this guy. This guy is probably the sort of guy who has a pet gorilla, or cultivates genetically-altered camels for a living; his purpose in life is to make things interesting. This is the sort of guy who you invite down to the pub for a drink, and wake up the next morning with “Andromeda Galaxy” or “GD 518” tattooed inside a love heart on your lower back.

My moral is this: Do something exciting today, or tomorrow. Go out and let people know that there’s a mind behind your face. Show them what you love, and make them love it too. Enjoy yourself! Don’t be the Average Joe Bloggs (if there’s anyone called Joe Bloggs out there, I’m sure that this doesn’t refer to you); get out and see the parts of the world that are exciting and wonderful! Be the astronomy lecturer in your group of friends!

If only I could remember his name…

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Life & Times – The Nullarbor

Posted on July 28, 2013 by Ryan O'Connor

I awake, far too early. The light from the curtains of the small window is bright, though, even though, when I check my watch with a groan, it is only 6:17. I stretch, plump my pillow against the back of my tiny bed and sit up. I should be getting my cup of morning tea soon.

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Stretching, I finally work up the courage to open the curtains and expose myself to the light. I sit, stunned by the panorama which seems so close that I can almost reach out and touch it. Instead, after a few, silent moments, I unlock my phone and type.

“Imagine this: a blank, blue space. At the halfway point, where your eyes comfortably rest, add a horizon, and below this, a flat, orange-reddish plain. Add grass, but not healthy grass: grass which grows but sparsely, and is coloured a dead grey. All that distinguishes any part of this void from its surroundings are the occasional small bush, less than half a meter tall and slightly green. And quail slightly on the inside, because you know that this void continues for not a few kilometres, not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands of kilometres. Welcome to the Nullarbor.”

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What To Do…?

Posted on July 28, 2013 by Ryan O'Connor

See, the thing is that I really have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know who I’m going with, and I don’t know whether, in the end, I’ll do anything worthwhile at all. Is that okay? Is that normal? Is it expected of a 17-year-old, a first-year at university, to not know what’s in store for them? Or does society expect that I at least know where I’m going with my life? Why am I even studying these subjects? 

In summary, my question really boils down to: Why do I wake up every morning?

Well, why does anyone? As far as I can tell, it’s for one of – maybe – three possible reasons. The first is love. As in, “I love my job, my girlfriend, and the place I live.” The second, as far as I can tell, is curiosity, or what could be described as curiosity. That can-do, I-want-to-see-the-other-side-of-that-hill-just-because-I-haven’t-so-far attitude that really irritates traditionalists. The last is debt. You could have to stay, in order to make good on your promises, or try to make other people’s lives better even if your own is awful because, in the end, there is no other meaning to life. 

Well, no one loves me. Well, that’s an exaggeration. I have my family, and they put up with me. They laugh at my jokes and listen when I talk, but I sometimes wonder if they do it because they actually, truly care, or if they just do it because they’re related to me, stuck in the same house day after day. Apart from that, no one shows the remotest sign of being interested in my existence. Which isn’t to say that I don’t try to get out in the world and meet people. I go to plays and go to the gym and join clubs and do all sorts of things at uni, and I’ve met tonnes of people. We say hello if we pass each other, and spare a smile for the other, and there’s one or two of them who make my day if I pass them, but I can’t help but wonder… Would any of them spare a thought if I suddenly vanished for ever? 

That’s love out of the bargain.

Curiosity… Well, I’ve seen a lot of stuff, and talked to a lot of people, but I can’t say that curiosity has ever led me to being properly happy; it hasn’t made my life so amazing that I’d wake up for the rest of eternity just to remember those times. I mean, I’ve been quite lucky; I’ve climbed mountains and met sherpas and farmers and monks and all sorts. I’ve crossed deserts and navigated ice flows and made my way through ancient cities, but what has it really given me? A specific way of looking at the world, yeah, but happiness? If I kept travelling, every day for the rest of my life, I might never have to worry about waking up in the morning, but that doesn’t mean that I would be happy. It’s like the difference between living forever and being eternally young. 

So I suppose I can count curiosity out too.

A debt to pay. Well, I have a lot of debts to pay. Not real debts, though I’m working on that, with my HECS loans, but moral ones. It’s right that I look after my parents, and try to make their lives easier, and it’s bad if I abandon them just to find the answer to a problem which, while important to me, is trivial in the long run. I suppose that the debt one is the one which rings bells for me. I can’t really be selfish enough to believe that I could just assume that no-one cares. That’d be tantamount to bad manners. I can’t not go to uni, because my parents want me to learn and get out into the world to make money. I can’t lie in bed all day on the weekend because it’d be selfish of me to do so. I can’t stay my shell and refuse to see the world because that’d mean that the past 17 years of my parents’ lives were a waste. Not a total waste, I suppose, because they did stuff other than look after me, but enough of a waste. 

Is that sense of doing it for the right reason worth the constant questioning? Of all three of the reasons, only love is really a proper one – the most desirable. A debt isn’t a reason, it’s more like an anchor. Curiosity is a luxury. What was it John Lennon sung about? “All You Need Is Love“? What if you don’t have love? What if you don’t love enough for it to be worth it? Is that the problem? Do I not love enough? Am I the problem?

Hell, I don’t even know. 

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