“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” Douglas Adams

More musings inspired by New Scientist, and the books of Stephen Baxter. If you haven’t come across Baxter before, I recommend him highly – his books are rooted in hard science and tend to evoke the same sense of wonder that Arthur C Clarke at his height was able to produce. He can plot a story over aeons of deep time and make you gasp with the way he describes the universe gradually, inexorably winding down to nothingness. Scrumpy’s sense that the universe is ultimately pointless is based to a large extent on his special brand of majestic cosmic miserableness.