I love the simplicity of the desert. Rocks, sand, awesome panoramic views, and lots of bright sparkling objects at night. Best of all, there are no other people around – not even close.

That’s why I ride in remote places. Other than the buzz of the BMW’s engine and “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star humming inside my helmet, there is very little to distract me. It helps me think more clearly. I suppose you could call it mental housekeeping. I don’t have the literary skills to articulate exactly what that means, but leave it to say that it’s something like a good acid trip without the acid.

You can really get away from people in Australia. It’s a continent similar in size to the United States with a population of 27 million compared to a U.S. population of 340 million. As a matter of fact, according to Wikipedia, Australia is the world’s least densely populated continent, aside from Antarctica which does not have a permanent human population.

And it’s the perfect place to ponder the heavens. You can look into the night sky and see pretty much everything that one can possibly see with the naked eye. Mostly bright stars or star systems within our Milky-Way Galaxy like Alpha Centauri (4.2 light-years from Earth) and Sirius A (8.6 light-years away and the brightest star in the sky other than our Sun). And with your undressed eye you can see the only extragalactic object visible without a telescope, the Andromeda Galaxy, if you know where to look and have good vision.

While this is all truly remarkable, I’m flabbergasted by what I can’t see which is pretty much ANYTHING and EVERTHING! Space is Big, probably infinite. So vast that we will never explore or even observe all of it and perhaps never learn why or how we exist. Even if you were Superman, Supergirl, or Super-thang, were immortal, and could fly at the speed of light, which is 671 million miles per hour you wouldn’t be able to see everything because apparently the Universe is expanding faster than the speed of light the further out you go, whatever that means.

But let’s say for arguments sake that we developed the technical ability to reach another star system that was home to a habitable planet 100 light-years away; that we somehow figured out how to survive the hazards and rigors of space travel; and that we could propel a space craft to 100 million miles per hour (15-20 percent the speed of light). That still equates to a whopping ETA of 600-700 years to reach our theoretical new home, or about the same length of time the Roman Empire was around. You’ll need lots of acid for that trip!

As the heat of the Australian Outback bakes my brain, I conclude that everything is incomprehensible, even my own life. Yes, it seems to me that the more the universe, and my own existence seem comprehensible, the more they also seem pointless. This must be what an acid trip is like.

I’ll try to elaborate in science-speak. When you look at a star in the night sky, what you actually see is the thing as it existed years ago, possibly thousands of years ago, because light photons (in the visible light range) can only travel at the speed of light and they still take a long time to get around. So if an extraterrestrial civilization was looking at Earth through a telescope right now, they would see the earth as it was in the past. If they were 1000 light-years away, they would be observing Earth during its Dark Ages. And if we happened to be looking back at them through our telescopes, all we would see is their world a thousand years ago. Another odd thing to consider is that while WE are clearly alive and kickin’, the folks whose civilization we have just observed may be long gone, dead, extinct, or not. Who knows. Talk about being late to the party! Such are the realities of space time, as I feel my brain imploding!

And ponder this next thing. Astronomers recently discovered an object that they are calling a Quasar with a Supermassive Black Hole at its center and an accretion disc of seven (7) light years wide. By comparison our entire solar system is .00127 light years wide. The Quasar is so expansive that its accretion disc would nearly span the distance between our own Sun and Sirius A, which is a bit more than 8 light years away. Not that it helps much, but for a bit of perspective, one light-year is nearly 10 trillion kilometers distance (so the Quasar is 70 trillion kilometers wide?). Moreover, the Black Hole at the center of this structure allegedly has a mass of 17 billion times that of our Sun and consumes the equivalent of one of our suns per day. So if the Black Hole is 12 billion light years away (thank goodness) and has been consuming the equivalent of one of our suns per day for the past 12 billion years, it must be pretty big by now!

Let’s try to get our heads around this. Let’s say for the purpose of comparison that if the Quasar represented a structure the size of planet Earth, our entire solar system would be about the size of a grain of sand on Waikiki Beach (Disclaimer: I didn’t actually do the math on that last one). Thus, while scientists can see and even describe these stellar structures/phenomenon (of course, as they were billions of years ago), I personally have trouble comprehending any of this. Why would something like that exist? How can it exist? What’s the point? Why am I so f…ing tiny! Where’s Alice?

So as I watch the Sun (its light took 8 minutes to reach me) set over the desert horizon, I am literally scratching my bald head. If the universe is far too big for us to conquer, or even comprehend, and we can’t go anywhere else because it’s too far, why are humans abusing and killing each other, and why create an environment inhospitable or hostile to human survival (as in global warming)? What’s the point of any of this? I guess this is what you call “pondering.”

Well, while I don’t think that I answered any questions, I seemed to have accomplished some mental housekeeping, and I feel pretty good, so I’ll just continue to ride into the desert to look at sand and rocks, and hope I don’t run into a Whowie or the Toecutter!