I was reading In A Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day (by Mark Batterson) the other day when I came across this nugget of information (summary of info, not an exact quote):
The sun is 93 million miles from Earth. The light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach Earth. The farthest known galaxies from Earth are 12.3 billion light years from Earth. The light from those galaxies will take 12.3 billion years to reach Earth.
This got me to thinking, which often times leads to some very strange and nonsensical musings. Here is what went through my head, into my hand, and onto an innocent, unassuming, oblivious piece of paper.
Does this mean that the world is constantly getting brighter? If it took 8 minutes for the sun’s light to get here and will take 12.3 billion years for the light from the most distant known galaxies to get here, what of all the stars and galaxies between the sun and the most distant galaxies? As time passes we are constantly receiving new light from stars that are farther and farther away. If that light is constantly being added to the light from the closer stars that are still giving off light it makes sense that they world as we see it would keep getting brighter. Of course some stars burn out and the light we receive from them will eventually be subtracted, but are stars burning out fast enough to compensate for all the new light? Or is it that our eyes are constantly adjusting to the brighter light? If our eyes are able to adjust to darkness then it certainly seems possible that they could adjust to brighter lights as well. I wonder – if we were to look back into history with our eyes adjusted to the amount of light we have now, would it seem like the world was much dimmer back then?
Does light equal heat? If so, would this begin to explain “global warming”? It would seem that as we receive more light, that light/heat would begin to make the world a little warmer.
What do you think? Am I on to something or is this utter nonsense? Probably the latter, but you never know. I like my friend Brent’s suggestion. He said that I should submit this to some scientists or a scientific journal and see how much money they would waste on trying to prove/disprove it. Sounds like a good idea to me. NASA spent $79 million to run some satellites into the moon to check for water and ice below the surface – maybe I could get them to waste some money on my crazy ideas too.
TIM PAYNE 