The Light Of Olympus

The Lights of Olympus

Second in the Size May Really Be Everything Series

The Cosmos is a place of extreme opposites. Desolate regions and realms where one world might be frozen cold beneath a star that burns dimly compared to our own sun. But where the surfaces of other planets run molten hot while their stars shine extra bright. So-called planemos wander in total darkness as other places and other worlds incandesce amid unending noonday suns.

Now imagine if you can, giant stars that are millions upon millions of times brighter than our own sun. Then try to conceive of how such a radiance would affect whatever planets might orbit such a star, at almost any distance. Were our sun to shine as brightly, no spot on Earth would could escape its brilliance, regardless of which side faced the light or away from it. Whether at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench or hidden away inside a recondite cave, the most remote recess would be filled with light and appear brighter than the sun does presently.

Our minds simply cannot begin to comprehend a radiance of this magnitude -- where light itself is its own shadow. Even Pluto would be a world without darkness, with no demarcation between dark and daylit sides. Perhaps the most distant comets and asteroids at the very fringe of the solar system might finally possess shadowed faces when turned from the sun's still-blinding shine.

In terms of all the universe has to offer, especially as regards its seeming fondness for flamboyancy, common Earthlings live a rather sheltered and quiet, unspectacular existence. Although it's just a guess on my part, the ultimate irony may well be that it is precisely within the uninteresting, backwater outskirts of galaxies that life (as we know it) establishes its first fragile footholds.

And if human beings serve as an example of what's possible, our exuberant, gregarious, and ebullient presence should one day make pale the brightest of stars.