Technology

Generally we have a poor conception of the scale of outer space. In his discussion of our solar system, Bryson makes an effort to give us a notion of the vastness of it all. The overly simplistic model of the sun and its nine planets that we usually come across can be very misleading in the pictures and models, the planets are depicted as being one next to the other more or less evenly spaced. But this is quite far from reality. For example, Neptune is actually five times further away from Jupiter as Jupiter is from us, receiving only 3 of the sunlight Jupiter receives. Even if we compress the giant gas planet Jupiter to the size of a dot, Pluto would still be 35 feet from the Earth in the scale model. Pluto is so far away that the sun would appear only as only a faint dot from it.

If Earth was the size of the pea, going by the models we are used to we would imagine Jupiter to be a big ball at the most a couple of feet away but it would be in fact 1000 feet away (size unspecified by author). And Pluto would be a mile and a half away, at about the size of a microscopic germ Again, going by our commonsense perception, we would place the nearest star in this model at, say, at the most a hundred miles away  but we would be grossly mistaken. The nearest star is not even a thousand miles away, but ten thousand The distances are mind-boggling.

The solar system  implying the realm held by suns gravity  does not end at around Pluto, but in fact extends half way up to our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is about 4 light years away. Pluto happens to be only one-fifty-thousandth of the way to the outer edge of our solar system. Beyond Pluto lie two vast zones of icy lumps, comets, and a variety of cosmic detritus revolving around the sun, known as the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. It is rather strange to think that these cosmic bodies revolve around a star that would be practically invisible from their vantage point, but such is the vastness of our solar system. The twin Voyager space probes, launched in the mid seventies and which are currently way past Pluto, would reach the Oort Cloud in about a ten thousand years.

Bryson states that it is inconceivable that humans would ever reach to distances so far, no matter how sophisticated our technology becomes. By implication, he rules out any journey to the stars. That is a depressing thought, nevertheless we are making a good progress in our explorations of outer space. Even within the next twenty years we are likely to discover a good deal more about the solar system and our place in the universe.

Bryson even speaks lightly about the idea of a manned mission to Mars, stating that the costs are formidable and there has not been found a solution yet for shielding the astronauts from the deadly solar radiation. But this is very much an erroneous observation. Back in 1997 itself, Robert Zubrin, the President of the Mars society, published a book delineating all the aspects of a manned mission to Mars and how it can be achieved within a fraction of NASAs projected spending. In the past few years America has reaffirmed its commitment to space exploration by proposing a manned mission to Moon in the coming decade and to Mars by 2030.

We already possess quite an advanced level of technology for observation and exploration of space, and it is growing rapidly, regardless space is an extremely challenging frontier indeed. As Bryson repeatedly emphasizes, space  and even our solar system which we would like to think of as our immediate neighborhood in the gargantuan stretches of our galaxy  is vast beyond conception. We have telescopes powerful enough to see from the earth if an astronaut lit a torch on the moon, but we still do not know definitively how many moons are there in our solar system. Bryson remarks that during his childhood it was thought that the solar system had 30 moons in all, but at the writing of the book it was at least 90. Since then though that number almost doubled, reaching now to 170 moons (The Planetary Society). This is largely thanks to the unmanned space probes we have sent in the recent years, such as Galileo and Cassini. NASA is going to send a few more space probes and telescopes in the coming decade, and they would be greatly expanding our knowledge of the solar system and beyond.  

Bryson notes that the astronomer who championed the existence of Pluto before its discovery in 1930 was expecting a really huge planet beyond Neptune, and Pluto turned out to be quite its opposite. However it could still be possible to discover a really huge planet, bigger than Jupiter and almost a twin star to the sun out there in the emptiness beyond Pluto. Within the next ten to twenty years, we can confirm the existence of such dark bodies in our solar system one way or other and can perhaps finalize our picture of the solar system. Many surprises could be in store for us.