Why space is an unceasing fascination
By: Fizza Khalid
Tags: Interstellar, Space, Space Exploration, Space Travel, Black Holes

Blackhole in Interstellar

I am a recent fan of astronomy. I came to love astronomy after watching Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-worthy sci-fi “Interstellar”. I highly recommend everyone to watch it.

It may be a bit difficult to wrap your head around at first but, trust me when I tell you it’s going to blow your mind. Nolan explores some of Einstein’s biggest theories without making it boring for his non-science qualified audience. He shows space like never before.

Most of us look up at the sky and are fascinated by the stars, so shiny, decorating the night sky beautifully, and for most that’s all there is to space but there’s so much more than meets the eye! Since I have seen that movie, I have done a lot of research about black holes, multiple dimensions, and space in general. Thinking and researching about space is like falling down a rabbit hole. There’s just so much!

Space is mysterious, eerily mysterious. There are massive objects (million times bigger than our sun), with the strongest gravitational pull, and so black, that we can’t even spot them! There are asteroids, meteors, comets, exoplanets with many moons, and so much more! So much that we’ve only scratched the surface in our discoveries and so much that we know nothing about. Interested yet? Hungry for more?

If so, get ready to have your mind blown by facts and theories about the mysteries of space.

Let’s start with a bit of scaling. Ever wondered how small we really are? The largest thing we know of, on the planet, is Mount Everest, right? That all comes inside the planet Earth, which in turn comes inside the solar system. Even in the solar system, the largest object is the Sun. It’s huge compared to any planet. According to National Geographic, it is more than 100 earths wide and could theoretically fit all 8 planets inside nearly 600 times! Imagine that! Earth is to the Sun like a sand grain is to a basketball. We are smaller than a tiny spec on the large scale of the universe. About as small as the beings of Whoville.

Looking at space made scientists and astronomers realize that there is actually a lot more we don’t know than previously imagined. Like, finding out how the visible Universe consists only of 3% matter we know, the rest is composed of dark matter and the greatest component (70%) is dark energy.

The discoveries are frightening as they are fascinating.

The unknown frightens us all and that is what space is, a universe unknown.

It is amazing how physicists and scientists theorized things more than a century ago and they are being proven and discovered now. Like black holes, the possibility of wormholes, and the existence of multiple dimensions. At the same time, some people say that it’s out of reach and that these are just theories to geek out space fanatics. But that is not all. Space exploration can actually have a lot of benefits, immensely so. Some even theorize the idea of “space mining” to solve the limited resources problem and other global challenges as space is full of infinitely rich objects (asteroids). Visionaries in Silicon Valley are actually working on this so are all other leading space agencies (NASA and Space X).

I know that such huge projects require a lot of time and perhaps an entire human lifetime might not be enough to actually plan and execute such a futuristic project but that just adds to the fascination, doesn’t it? We keep wondering how we can reach these heavenly objects.