Down the Drain

What you said sounds familiar, I think I have heard most of it before, except for the part about the dark energy. I had heard of dark matter before, and I figured that dark energy was just another way of expressing it, since matter and energy are now considered to be consubstantial. From what you said, it doesn't seem like we will be able to harness dark energy any time soon, so I guess we can cross it off our list of potential power sources for our home generators. This leaves only antimatter, which  is too unstable to be of practical use to us, unless someone comes up with something like the fictional dilithium crystals. It would appear, then, that our project is at a dead end for now. I'm not giving up on it, but let's put it on the back burner for awhile.

I think that gravity is what holds the galaxies together. National Geographic had an article about black holes awhile back, and it said that they appear to be at the center of most galaxies, which might explain their spiral configuration. It looks like everything in the galaxy is going down the drain, but the opposite may be true. As material approaches the event horizon, most of it is flung back out because it approaches at an angle and accelerates as it does so. Only the stuff that approaches perpendicular to the event horizon gets sucked in, and it may be flung out the other end. Nobody knows for sure, because we can't see what the other end of a black hole looks like, if it even has another end. Black holes are another one of those speculative theories that make sense only because they explain a bunch of other stuff that wouldn't make sense without them.

That's why it's so hard to work with this stuff, we have grown up on a diet of science fiction and futuristic speculation, and it can be hard to glean anything that might be actually useful out of it. The other day there was a question on the TV snow "Jeopardy" pertaining to a patent infringement lawsuit that was filed by Apple against Samsung. Apple claimed that Samsung had copied the design of their I-Pad when they came out with a tablet of their own. Samsung claimed that they had gotten the idea from a movie that was released in 1968, and we had to guess the title of the movie. My guess was "2001: A Space Odyssey", which turned out to be correct. I don't remember seeing anything like an I-Pad in that movie but, since it was a movie rather than a TV show, that ruled out Star Trek. There were some Star Trek movies that came out later, but not in 1968. That was the year I met my future hypothetical wife, and I remember seeing "2001" with her before we got married in 1969, so that pretty well narrowed it down.

It's kind of depressing to think that the year 2001 came and went without anything happening that remotely resembled the movie. In 1968, 2001 seemed like a long way off into the future, and now it's ancient history. It was in 69 that they put a man on the Moon, and we were supposed to be on the threshold of a wonderful era of space exploration. Whatever became of that? We've got lots of satellites in Earth orbit, and they do great things for us, but I was hoping for a habitable planet, like a second Earth, where we could start all over again fresh. I suppose there's no guarantee that they wouldn't screw up the second Earth just like they have the first one, but it would have been fun to start all over and see if we could get it right this time.