(whimsical)
Radio Andromeda
I take a daily half-hour walk, sometimes inside our house, or the back yard, or around several blocks in our neighbourhood. While doing that, most of the time I listen to the radio or music library on my cell phone. I've set the music to be played in random sequence. It seems to make the time go faster.
One of the tracks is called "Radio Andromeda" (electronic music by Michael Walthius). 7 minutes long, it has just the right tempo for a good walk. The other day, walking, and fantasizing that this melody was actually a transmission sent by a civilization living somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy, and imagening my receiving it just now on my radio. It would imply a much advanced intelligence but with a technology in some way compatible with ours.
We know of nothing in our physical world that can move faster than the speed of light. The interesting aspect of my fantasy would be that this music would have had to be transmitted about 2,400,000 years ago, since the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.4 million light years distant. It also means that these "Andromedans" will have had 2,400,000 years to evolve since then (approximately the time it has taken for humans to evolve from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens). If they exist, would we even be able to recognize them?
There is another field of physics, the mathematical and observational basis of how the world around us works: it is called Quantum Mechanics. Personally, I find it difficult to wrap my mind around many of the concepts of this discipline. Perhaps the "Andromedans" have mastered the art of making use of its quantum entanglement and superposition effects, and have somehow circumvented its no-communication theorem. That might give them the ability to be aware of who we are and what we do in "real time", even from a distance as far away as the Andromeda Galaxy. (NO, I don't take "social" drugs, or smoke anything. I do have the occasional glass of red wine, though not before my daily walk).
This fantasizing is, of course, just my brain freewheeling. Quite aside from that, I look at the Andromeda Galaxy through binoculars often, preferably from an area with no or little light pollution. It looks nothing like its long-exposure, colourful photos. Our visual perception of it is colourless. The light emitted from all the stars in that galaxy is too faint to stimulate the colour receptors in our eyes.
As an example, look at our own galaxy, the Milky Way. We can't see it in our light-polluted cities at all; in dark areas it just appears to be, well, faintly "milky" - no colour. Consider that we actually live inside our galaxy, in comparison, at its distance, it's no wonder the Andromeda Galaxy appears so faint. And yet, it is larger than our Milky Way and bright enough under a clear, dark sky to be visible with the naked eye as a grey patch. The best view I've had of the Andromeda Galaxy was in 1993 under a very dark sky at Crater Lake, Oregon.
This image approximates how the Andromeda Galaxy shows in binoculars under a dark sky.
I've written in earlier posts how useful binoculars are in astronomy; if you know the sky reasonably well, a whole evening can pass looking at or searching for many objects, using only binoculars. Interesting views of those, i.e. the Orion Nebula, M13 (the global cluster in the constellation Hercules), the Milky Way in our southern sky with several gaseous nebulae and star clusters, and numerous stars; several nebulae in the Cygnus area overhead; all are bright enough to be visible at this time of year. The wide field of view in binoculars make them ideal for objects that cover a wider area in the sky. Stars bright enough to actually show some colour are also enhanced when looking at them through binoculars.
A comfortable reclining chair greatly enhances an experience similar to actually being "in space". You may even want to listen to a radio while you're exploring the sky, perhaps looking at the Andromeda Galaxy. Who knows what you might hear... ?
