# I. Beneath the stars
Why do schools only teach history through books when we can look into the past? Looking into the night sky, we usually see airplanes, artificial objects, and, further away, stars. Everything we observe through light has a latency.
Something just 1 meter away from us is about 0.0000000033 seconds in the past. The ISS (International Space Station), ~415 km from Earth, is from about 0.001 seconds ago. The Moon, 384,400 km away, about 1.28 seconds ago. Mars, ~56-401 million km, roughly 3-22 minutes. Even with the smallest amount of time, we are still looking into the past.
Starting with the closest things to Earth in space — artificial objects. There are all kinds of them — weather satellites like NOAA, satellite internet constellations like Starlink, and space stations like the ISS and Tiangong in Low Earth orbit (LEO); navigation systems like GPS and GLONASS in Medium Earth orbit (MEO); TV satellites in Geostationary orbit (GEO); and more. Some satellites, including the ISS, are also equipped with radio repeaters that can relay ham radio signals. And besides that, there's more: SSTV, APRS, and other experiments that let us interact with things that are hundreds or even tens of thousands of kilometers above us.
Further away, we leave the "human part" of space and come across countless stars, planets, and other celestial objects, each at different distances from us and from one another. The closest star to Earth after the Sun is Proxima Centauri, about 4.24 light-years away. When we see it, we are seeing it as it was about 4.24 years ago.
It's interesting how some stores still sell toy telescopes when, so often, we can barely see anything because of light pollution and city lights. Or maybe there's still a reason to keep them around — to remind us of what we had and what we could have again in the future.
If the distance between us is 9,300 km, we are about 0.031 seconds apart. Insignificant, yet significant.
The ISS has been in space for 28 years and is coming to an end. The Sun has already been around for about 4.6 billion years, and it still has roughly another 5 billion years before its current phase comes to an end.
And us?
The global average life expectancy is around 73 years.
28, 5 billion, and 73.
We sometimes think of our lives as long 'cause they seem to be all we have, and we experience them second by second, minute by minute. But put them next to everything around us, and we look up at the sky. The Sun has existed for billions of years. Some stars have too.
And yet, here we are. Just a brief moment.
The ISS will eventually come down. The Sun will eventually change. Stars will eventually burn out. And we will eventually become part of the past too. Until then, what do we do with the time we have?
# Sources & Notes:
OpenWebRX / NASA Science: Radio JOVE / The Radio JOVE Project / WWV / Earth / NOAA weather satellites / NOAA weather radio / Starlink tracker / Starlink Map / ISS tracker / ISS tracker (alternate) / Amateur radio satellites / NA1SS / ARISS Status / ARISS Contact / ISS live cam / ISS live cam (alternate) / ISS live cam (alternate) / Tiangong tracker / GPS tracker / GLONASS tracker / NASA: 20 Years Ago / NASA: ISS / Proxima Centauri / Light pollution map / Sun: Life Cycle and Stellar Evolution / NASA Science: Sun facts / ISS Deorbit / Life expectancy (2020-2025)
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