Nature Tells You How Special You Are
(Photo: Gerald Rhemann)
Bear with me for 15 minutes, and I'll share something with you that's, out of this world.
I'm sharing today so you know, how very special your life is. For this week, the week of Oct 9th-16, 2024, you are/or were one of the only human lifetimes chosen to witness this incredibly rare traveler put on a show.
You see, for the last 4 or 5 days, just after sunset, a visitor from 2 light years away has come to meet us, one that no modern human being has ever seen.
It turns out, perhaps once every 80,000 years, that comet unceremoniously named Comet C/2023 A3 Soo—Chin–Chan ATLAS (can we just call it Atlas?) permits us the most rare of privileges to grace its presence.
Atlas has been showing up every evening in the West over the Verdugo Mountains where I live in Montrose, CA. And the only reason you and I can see it, is on account of its quite neighborly proximity and unfathomable size.
The head of the comet is 130,000 miles in diameter. Earth's diameter is 7,926 miles.
The tail length is 18 million miles long. It takes one minute for light to travel that distance.
This massive object looms quite close astronomically, at 44 million miles away. That's only half the distance to sun and far, far, closer to us than any star or planet*
By the way, Atlas hurtles through space at 150,000 miles per hour.
Atlas is also on an ancient journey, and this last Friday, it completed its loop of 4 light years / 24 trillion (with a T) mile, between us and the Oort Cloud. In America, it crossed the finish line while I completed sanding for a 1920s door in my shop. Perhaps you booked a restaurant on Melrose, or began your observance of Yom Kippur. Atlas shrugged while we sat embroiled in the most controversial American election ever, amidst several volatile global conflicts, while Rihanna was on tour and a hurricane destroyed the livelihood, and many lives, of hundreds of thousands of American citizens.
In a average human lifetime of 77.5 years, it's so mathematically rare that YOU are the one of the rare lives who has the chance to see Atlas complete its trip. 4 in 3000 human generations got this chance to witness this rare traveler. You were most certainly meant to see it, and even if you yourself didn’t witness it, we are sure to be affected by its mere existence and, thus, to hear its silent message.
You see, Atlas may not return at all. If its orbit were to become hyperbolic, it may easily eventually escape the gravitational pull of our Sun and be on its way to another world to someday visit its citizens and remind them too that we are all minute creatures with fleeting lives. Between our social posts and ChatGPT sessions, Nature occasionally shakes perspective and scale back into our fragile frames.
May I feel fortunate
to have seen Atlas in my lifetime,
and be reminded to live this fleeting life
with joy, selflessness,
an artist's spirit,
and the purest of love I can give.
xo
Christopher
*FWIW Venus and Mars do get closer at their perigee to Earth each year, but they are much, much smaller than Atlas.
