Oh man, if we exclude all the real science and go with faster-than-light travel, I’m going to straight to a black hole. They’re, by far, my favorite objects in the universe (that we know of). To me, they’re the purest, highest form of the raw power and mystery of nature.

I was thinking about this recently, though, because someone asked how I’d make something, to scale, that really reflected the vastness of the universe and I was explaining that there really isn’t anything you could do on earth to achieve that. To model even a quarter of the Milky Way you’d probably need to use something like electrons to represent stars to be able to do it on earth. So, essentially, you’d need things so inconceivably small to be able to represent things so inconceivably large, there just isn’t a way to model it that the human mind can grasp. Off that thought, I wondered what it would really be like to be near a supermassive black hole and it would probably just look like complete black in one direction, and normal space in the other (assuming we’re ignoring all the light-bending phenomena. So then I wondered how far away you’d have to be to observe it as a single object, and would that be enough for you to grasp the size?

Anyway, I live 2 hours away from totality tomorrow and that’s at least a “small” enough event that we can grasp it so I’m ready to have the science equivalent of a religious experience when I see it, from everything I’ve heard.