Guardian of the Bear

Arcturus is an orange-red giant star. It is located about 36.7 light-years from our Sun. Furthermore, Arcturus is the brightest star of the northern hemisphere in Spring and the fourth brightest star in the Earth's night sky. Its name is a variant of the Greek for "Guardian of the Bear".

It is difficult to comprehend its size and dimensions. The following, simplified example might be helpful.

Sun's diameter is about 100 times that of the Earth. You could line up 100 Earth's end-to-end to stretch across the face of the sun. About 1.000.000 Earths would fit inside the Sun.

The size of the giant star Arcturus compared to the Sun can be seen on the picture (click on it). It is astonishing!

How much time would it take to travel to Arcturus? As mentioned before, the distance from our Sun to Arcturus is 36.7 light years. A light year is a unit of distance. It is the distance that light can travel in one year. Light moves at a velocity of about 300,000 kilometres (km) each second. So in one year, it can travel about 10 trillion km. More precisely, one light-year is equal to 9.500.000.000.000 kilometres. Converted this means that Arcturus is 348.650.000.000.000 kilometres away from the Sun.

The average top speed of a half decent modern car is about 200 km/h. If I would drive one year constantly, I would make 1.752.000 km (about 100 times “driving” from London to Los Angeles and back). If I would start my journey from the Sun, it would take me 199.001.141 years to reach Arcturus.

199 million years of driving!

Why are we here?

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum."

" I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."


Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) American poet and novelist

Viktor Frankl on Nihilism

"If we present man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present him as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of heredity and environment. If we do that we will feed the nihilism which modern man is in any case prone. I became acquainted with the last stage of corruption at my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment, or as the Nazis liked to say 'of blood and soil.' I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry of defense or other in Berlin but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers."


Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor (1905 - 1997)

A poem about modern progress

First dentistry was painless;
Then bicycles were chainless
And carriages were horseless
And may laws, enforceless.
Next, cookery was fireless,
Telegraphy was wireless,
Cigars were nicotineless
And coffee, caffeineless.
Soon oranges were seedless,
The putting green was weedless,
The college boy hatless,
The proper diet, fatless,
Now motor roads are dustless,
The latest steel is rustless,
Our tennis courts are sodless,
Our new religions, godless.


Arthur Guiterman (1871-1943)

Stephen Jay Gould on meaning of life

"The human species has inhabited this planet for only 250,000 years or so-roughly.0015 percent of the history of life, the last inch of the cosmic mile. The world fared perfectly well without us for all but the last moment of earthly time-and this fact makes our appearance look more like an accidental afterthought than the culmination of a prefigured plan. Moreover, the pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable. Human evolution is not random; it makes sense and can be explained after the fact. But wind back life's tape to the dawn of time and let it play again-and you will never get humans a second time.

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a "higher" answer-but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating. We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these answers ourselves-from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way."


Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), American paleontologist

20th Century Man

"It is difficult to resist the conclusion
that twentieth-century man has decided to abolish himself.

Tired of the struggle to be himself,
he has created boredom out of his own affluence,
impotence out of his own erotomania,
and vulnerability out of his own strength.

He himself blows the trumpet
that brings the walls of his own cities crashing down
until at last,
having educated himself into imbecility,
having drugged and polluted himself into stupefaction,
he keels over a weary, battered old brontosaurus
and becomes extinct."


Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990), British journalist