The Suicidal Planet

This is my first post here on One Pagan Voice and I'm not going to spend it introducing myself because I can do that in my profile, or in another post, which I will do. This post, instead, is on an article I just got finished reading on Yahoo about a planet about 325 light years away from us that is spiraling into its sun.

What could possibly be so interesting about that? There's probably no life on the planet because it's about 3,200 degrees and we couldn't imagine life surviving at that temperature. It's going to die, but in a million years or so. That's honestly....we'll never see it happen. Not just us, but possibly humans. It's also impossibly far away. At 325 light years, maybe million, I don't remember, we're not going to go exploring even if it weren't so hot.

So why make a first post on a dying planet, millions of miles away, too hot anyway and, I forgot to mention, larger than Jupiter?

Because it's there, it's, slightly, interesting to me and it made me think. When I was younger I was taught there were 9 planets. 9! That number has been moved around many times. There are now 8 planets in our solar system and Pluto has been reduced to a dwarf planet. Though personally I like it being a planet. 9 is a good number. But back to the number of planets...it's definitely not 9, or even 8. It's so much more. So many more. And there's a good chance that at least 1 harbours life. It doesn't have to be life like on Earth, in fact that might be boring. But chances of us being alone in this huge thing call thed universe is slight.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, though conspiracy theories are fun. I'm not some UFO hunter, alien freak or Trekker(that's the correct term, not Trekkie.) I'm just a person who thinks odds are in favour of Earth not being the only planet with life.

So back to the dying planet. My first thought was of life that could be on the planet. I refered to that "life" as people. So let's pretend for a moment there was life and they called themselves people. I thought how would they feel knowing that for certain their planet wasn't going to survive the next 3 millia. Beyond that I thought what if those people had religion, who would they worship? Their form(s) of religion is/are probably so different from ours and how cool it would be to learn about them. But alas we probably can't, if they exist.

So what in the world does this have to do with paganism? Nothing really, but since the purpose of this blog is to write something on paganism, or connect something to paganism, or give my pagan thoughts everday, or nearly, here's a stab at something.

The universe is huge. Now whether it's expanding or contracting isn't the point, it's big. It's so big it's unimaginable to the human mind. I'm sent reeling thinking of how large it is. It instantly takes up the available space in my head. And in this universe there are so many things we know little to squat about. Planets, stars, asteroids, comets, space dust, ice, dark matter, matter, anti-matter, anti-dark matter matter, black holes etc. And it was created. It was created somehow.

Christians believe God did it. I believe Hindus believe Braham spoke it into existence. I love the Greek myth on Chaos having everything and out of Chaos was born Eros, Gaia, Nyx and other primordial Deities. Some follow that the Goddess gave birth to the God, or Herself, or She did everything Herself.

Now seeing as how I like the Greek myth of Chaos I kind of think we're all floating in the "arms" of Chaos, which is neither female or male and both at the same time. I guess you could call it The All. But because The All is like the universe, so it's large and too much for my mind to handle. Which gives me a good feeling oddly enough. Chaos birthed Nyx(night), Eros(love) and Gaia(Earth). Gaia is very important because we know Her as our planet. But Gaia would be very small if She were just our planet. I believe Gaia makes up the planets and other solid matter in the universe, excepting a few things. So while Jupiter is named after the Roman chief God, patterned somewhat after Zeus, and would be male, Gaia makes up Jupiter. So if Gaia makes up Jupiter and Earth, and this suicidal planet and asteriods and the moons then it's all connected(this is also another discussion I'll get into later on magick.) We're connected to that dying planet because we live on Earth. We're part of the earth, literally anyway. So we're connected to this dying planet.

We won't be around, in this body, to see its demise. We may not be around as a species to see it either. But while we're here and know this about this planet we're connected to it by even just one small "thread." My wonder about the "people" on the planet isn't some fantastical notion. I'm sure if there are people they probably wonder about us. Because we're connected. We're connected by the PD(primordial Diety) Gaia. It's something wonderful to think, I think. Pluto isn't some lifeless rock with a downgraded status and WASP-18b(the name of the planet) isn't some suicidal planet. Somewhere, deep down inside us, we feel bad for the planet.

But there is hope. The planet will be folded into the arms of Chaos again. It will die and some part of it will immediately go to Chaos to be used elsewhere. Much of it will go into the start, which will eventually die itself, going to Chaos to be used elsewhere. Gais, or Nyx, or Eros will use what's there to do whatever They do. So the planet may come back. It may be a very Earth-like planet, or the dark matter, or something we've yet to discover.

So that's my first post. It was long I know, but most posts won't be so long. In fact they'll be very short. I also know it was a bit stream-of-consciousness, but that's how I write best.

Future topics:

1. reincarnation
2. Greek mythology
3. the Goddess
4. magick

This is the link to the article if you want to read it. The Suicidal Planet