A couple of days back when there was a path breaking scientific finding reported in the press, I was personally enthralled at the future possibilities it is likely to unravel. What does this image, captured for the first time, of Supermassive black hole convey to a common man? Let us first comprehend what it is.

The cosmic portrait belongs to the black hole at the center of Messier 87, the largest galaxy we know of, about 54 million light-years away. The image shows the boundary between light and dark around a black hole, called the event horizon – the point of no return, where the gravity of the black hole becomes so extreme that nothing that enters can ever escape. At the center of the black hole, time and space become so curved upon themselves that the “presently known” laws of physics break down completely.

Months after Einstein produced the equations for general relativity in 1915, German physicist Karl Schwarzschild calculated that if an object is dense enough, it would create a bottomless pit in spacetime known as a “singularity.” Anything within a certain radius of that pit – a region known as the “event horizon” – would be swallowed by its gravity. A black hole (another name for such a singularity) consumes clouds of gas and stars that wander too close; not even light can escape. But, Einstein found the notion so preposterous that he devoted an entire research paper to debunking it. But all the subsequent evidences suggested that Einstein was wrong about black holes but his theory was right.

But the interesting point to be noted is that the photo represents the status 54 million light years before… closer to the Big Bang? The photo released by the astrophysicists is an image of a black hole which is 5*10**20 ( 5 followed by twenty zeros) kms away or 54 million light years away. In other wards the light (or the electromagnetic radiation in this case) has taken 54 million years to reach the earth! In other wards the photo now taken is an image that is as old as 54 million years.

Now do you get what I mean? The possibility of getting an image today (live) of an event that occured long time back is no more a myth but is a reality. May be more such information is around us, but the only problem is we don’t have yet the gadgets to capture. Can’t believe yet? It is like those who would not have believed some fifty years back watching a football match or talk to your kith and kin live across the continents. If you can decipher the information around us, we might watch things of the past, live!

Stephen Hawking in his epoch making popular book, A brief history of time, talks about ‘black holes’ formed by a star when it has exhausted all its nuclear fuel and contracts to form a body with tremendous gravitational force, where even light can’t escape! After the Big Bang as we are presently in the expanding phase, he postulates that there may be a contracting phase in the future. That is the expanding universe would begin to contract. In this phase, it may so happen that you would be able to see the ‘only the future and not the past‘ unlike what we experience in the present phase where we see only the past and not the future…akin to the rewind play in a video recorder!

But would it be possible now to know the future? (You can make a killing in stock market), May be – it is only in the fiction so far.

In Some ancient myths, there are characters skipping forward in times.  Hindu mythology Mahabharata mentions the story of King Raivata Kakudmi,  who travels to heaven to meet the creator  Brahma and is surprised to learn when he returns to Earth that many ages have passed. Similar stories exist in the Buddhist Pali Canon and the Japanese tale of “Urashima Taro” Even In Jewish In tradition, the 1st-century BC scholar Honi ha-M’agel, is said to have fallen asleep and slept for seventy years. When waking up he returned home but found none of the people he knew, and no one believed his claims of who he was. Would you not start believing that these may be true after all.

But all scientific fictions and mythological stories floating since ages in almost all the nook and corners of the world, may no more be fantasies! Don’t doubt such possibilities!

Bertrand Russel wisely said, The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people are full of doubts. Why shouldn’t we think the mythological stories are the result of wishful daydreaming possibilities.

It may not be even unreasonable to visualise a future, the following breaking news appearing in your TV live visuals of Exodus of Moses:

Moses escapes Egypt after man slaughtering: crosses the Red Sea with his followers: watch the Big Exodus live.

Exclusive coverage in this channel: Watch for updates!