Spirograph, Fat Shoppers, and Urban Myth--I believe in intelligent design

With the blood-curdling vision of two very fat shoppers careening around a corner of the produce section, I woke up last night, on the hottest night yet of the summer, to a freezing cold breeze blowing through the window. Heart hammering, brow in a cold sweat, I kept repeating over and over, "I believe in intelligent design...I believe in intelligent design."

Last night my daughter dragged me onto the back patio to look at the moon, one side going flat like a car tire in a construction zone, and told me, "They say that tonight Mars will be the size the of the moon when it rises!" And she was adamant. "Tonight is the closest Mars will ever be to the earth in centuries, and if you don't see it, you'll miss it!"

And so I, like all good mothers and well-rounded women of science should do, stayed up waiting to see this phenomenon that would never be witnessed again by even my grandchildren. I pictured them sitting at the foot of my rocking chair as I described the red planet, rising in the east like a giant rubber dodge ball, the god of war riding his majestic chariot beneath the glowing moon, two twin orbs of light and fire...

Am I just stupid? "They say" should have been my first tip-off, as if I wasn't smart enough to pick up on the likelihood of a planet the same size as the moon. And the faint voice ringing in my head, "Didn't somebody say this like...five years ago?" wasn't that enough, or the fact that she got this info from a friend on....email???

Please tell me I wasn't the only one duped again by an urban myth. Please tell me I'm not the only one who still shudders when I think of all the spare change slots I've reached into and narrowly escaped without being infected with AIDS from the hypodermic needle. Reassure me that I'm not alone at Walmart doing shallow chest breathing, looking for the tell-tale bottle of red hair dye in the bathroom trash can when I can't find my daughters in electronics like they said they'd be. Calm me by telling me that the car that just flashed its lights isn't really going to pull out an AKA-some-number and open fire in a drive-by shooting...that the man asking if I lost the $10 bill by the gas pump isn't going to slap duct-tape on my mouth, stuff me in my trunk and drive away...that I haven't contracted breast cancer from all the frozen water bottles I've drunk from, and the ones I've discarded aren't really bombs left in the neighbor's yard.

T

Turns out, according to Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer for Space.com,

 that Mars and the earth are always this close (about 34 million miles close) together about every 26 months. It's just the way the orbits work out. It's like a Spirograph--you know, that cool plastic toy from your childhood that created cosmic looking geographical designs sure to make Sputnik and the Russians sick with envy. It's the off-centeredness of the spinning orbs that makes the converging and diverging lines.

But that's when I realized we are all doomed. DOOMED! Because, I don't know about you...but I remember Spirograph being one of THEEE most frustrating toys I ever owned as a child. (Okay, it was my big brother's..I never got anything cool). My designs, not one, ever turned out like the examples in the little book. Spirograph designs like the one above are as big an urban myth as the bride that cooked to death in a tanning bed. You know it's true. Every single time, just when you thought it was all going so swimmingly, little teeth in little gears humming around the inside of an ellipse, plastic ballpoint working in harmony with God and nature...

BOOM!

The pen would glitch, the gear would jump, the ellipse would slip, and with a noise like grinding teeth, your perfect poly-dex-hedron-lypsy would look like Phyllis Diller's hair.

34 million miles away..................sounds like a lot, huh? Well, think again. Imagine that the distance from the earth to the sun (93 million miles, or about 8 light minutes) is compressed to the thickness of a typical sheet of paper. The diameter of the Milky Way (100,000 light years) would require a 310 mile high stack of paper, while the distance to the Andromeda galaxy (at 2 million light years one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye) would require a stack of paper more than 6000 miles high! (That's not me talking, that's William P. Blair of Johns Hopkins University)


But that means (this is me talking now) that in Bill's terms...the space between Earth and Mars last night was less than the thickness of a piece of paper.


Get me a paper sack, I think I'm going to faint! The only other time I have ever felt this vagal was when Mr. Wright, my 8th grade science teacher, told us that if the earth ever stopped spinning we would all fly off into outer space at 1,000 miles per hour. I spent months chaining my ankle to the bed leg at night in case the cessation of rotation occurred during my sleep.


34 million miles.....what in the world keeps Earth and Mars from colliding like two fat old ladies wheeling through the produce department with only 30 minutes left before their respective dinner parties? ...................LUCK?


Last night I went to bed, after Mars--the size of a pea to the moon's giant beach ball--finally rose. But I went to bed wondering why people who worry about hair dye and hypodermic needles and drinking bottles are even able to sleep knowing that the earth is revolving around the sun at...oh...approximately 64 THOUSAND miles per hour.


Hmmmmm. Maybe they can't. Maybe like me, when the cold breeze hits on a hot summer night, they too sit bolt upright in bed and realize that in all this cosmic design there has to be a larger hand at work. A creator that can function in terms of light seconds and half-widths of paper.


An exterior designer who chuckles as we chain ourselves to the bed leg even as we hurtle through space, several directions at once, at thousands of miles per hour without a second thought.