The People at Your Door

And that is a relative of our own galaxy--the Milky Way--but this one is 15 million light years away.

The Hubble telescope took the image, and scientists have given it the name, "Spiral galaxy M83", the Southern Pinwheel. It is in the constellation, Hydra.

To say it is 15 million light years away is to say that it took the light 15 million years to get here. Light travels at about 300,000 kilometers per second. So M83 does not look like that today. That is what it looked like 15 million years ago. It is not advised, but if you were to take a peek at our own star--the Sun: Sol--you are really seeing what it looked like 8 minutes ago. M83 is . . . 15 million light years away.

The whole universe is almost a thousand times older than that so, relatively speaking, M83 is pretty close.

What we see is what used to be.

The people who show up at your door, who want to read to you from whatever scripture they hold in their hands, really want to tell you how people thought, 1 or 2 or 3 thousand years ago.

That is somewhere between 8 minutes and 15 million years, but dramatically closer to 8 minutes than to 15 million years.

Ask the people at your door to go away and draw a picture of that, and come back when they are done and tell you how their thinking has changed.

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