New Series: DOES ANYONE ELSE KNOW ABOUT THIS?

As a writer of things strange and unusual, I often have to research topics that are stranger and more unusual than I would immediately guess. This leads to a great deal of complication in my daily productivity. Anyone who sets foot in the bog of Wikipedia can promise that once you start following links, they lead you down some pretty life-changing paths. And every once in a while, I learn something about the world that, for a variety of reasons, scares the hell out of me.

Which is why I’m starting a new series of posts: DOES ANYONE ELSE KNOW ABOUT THIS?

The intentions of DAEKAT are threefold:

1) To entertain.

2) To figure out how I’ve overlooked some of the world’s most staggering and overwhelming truths.

3) To help us all become better citizens of the Universe. I’ll explain this one in a minute.

Galaxies are BIG — so awfully, frightfully big that I probably shouldn’t think about them as much as I do. The spaces between galaxies? I know enough not to go there. People are so preoccupied with the possibility of life on other planets, but that’s not even a blip on the radar compared to the stuff out there. How the size of it all dwarfs the span of our imagination.

Ponder this during traffic jams, and feel content at the truth of yourown insignificance. I’m willing to bet it’s saving me a fortune on therapy. Or it’s giving my future therapist a headache. Either way.

And along these lines, I submit for your approval: Galaxy Filaments.

Does anyone else know about this?

Across the Universe, there are vast chains of galaxies, superclusters (thousands of galaxies packed together), and Lyman-alpha blobs (massive concentrations of gas) spanning anywhere from 50-80 megaparsecs in length. For those of you who know your Star Wars terminology, a parsec is about 3,262,000 light years long. A megaparsec is one million of those.

I have a problem with these galactic filaments. I’ve managed to survive nearly 27 years of life without encountering any. How is a citizen of the cosmos supposed to keep up? It’s like being born in the United States and taking for granted free speech or the right to bear arms. It’s like suddenly forgetting you have hands, and picking up a fork with your mouth.

Carl Sagan, not even you could have prepared me for this!

Galactic filaments are the largest known cosmic structures in the Universe, and they passed me by without a glance. This is a grave injustice that I, working very closely with my contacts at the Internet, intend to rectify.

Is anyone else disturbed or intrigued to know know that there is a spider web of matter stretching an unfathomable distance over our heads?

That’s the point of DAEKAT in a nutshell.

Seriously though, did anyone else know about this?

Sleep tight, readers. I know I won’t.

“The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! …Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse…Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him…”