Looking at the Stars
Last night, I got a little drunk on Coronas and Cazadores Tequila mixed as margaritas. The occasion? Well, it was my oldest brother’s birthday. It was a nice evening, I was laying on our hammock that is attached to our two palm trees. I was resting there alone in the night, looking at the sky. The clouds were moving pretty fast and there were periods where I could see the stars and the moon. The stars were sprinkled in the night, pitch black with a glowing white dot all over. I like stars. I admire their beauty and power, the power to light up the darkness. At the same time, I felt so little and insignificant. It didn’t depress me, just made me aware of the truth; we are nothing in comparison to the rest of the universe. My mind recalled Arthur Eddington, the man who worked out where the Sun’s energy came from. It is said that he was out walking with a girlfriend one night. His girlfriend looked up at the stars and said how beautiful they were. He replied “yes, indeed, but tonight I’m the only one who understands how they shine”. He and later Hans Bethe and others contributed to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, how a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion, the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. In fact, all elements heavier than the hydrogen and helium were created by fusion reactions in stars, in our case, from the sun.
I was in awe, looking at those flickering distant lights in the night sky. All that we see with our eyes is but a glimpse of the past, we need light to see, and our cone and rod photoreceptors in our retina allow for phototransduction. Light travels at around 186, 282 miles per second, and light from distant stars take a long time to get here. For instance, if you were to look at a recent photograph of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy (our closest neighboring galaxy), what you will be looking at is a photograph of how the Andromeda looked millions of years ago. The light to make that photograph on M31 took a damn long time to arrive here. Even when you look around for the keys to your car, or the smile of that special someone in your life, what you are seeing is the immediate past, not the present. We can never see something as it really is happening. By the time light reaches your retina and goes through phototransduction, fractions of seconds have passed. Also, the visible electromagnetic spectrum is due to our proximity to the sun and the size of our sun. Any bigger difference and we would have seen in a different spectrum range.
I kept thinking all this fascinating stuff, when my brother approached me.
“Want a cigarette?”
“Sure, why the hell not?”
I am not crazy about smoking, in fact, I do not smoke, just on rare occasions. This happened to be one of them. I do not understand how people sign away their will to be a slave of cigarettes. It is not appealing to taste like an ash tray when you kiss. I got the Marlboro cigarette and he lighted it for me. My back was hurting all of a sudden and then I started thinking about someone special. Alcohol and cigarettes do not form a man, but the inward qualities of himself. 
