-Astronomer Robert Burnham, Celestial Handbook, Vol.1, p.13.
What are the odds that we are alone in the universe?
I was but a toddler growing up on a farm called "Gemakstroom" (Afr. Comfortstream) in the foothills of "Skurweberg" (Afr. Rough Mountain) when one dark starry night my father took me up in his arms and we went outside to show me what I think was supposed to be a lunar eclipse. I had no idea what he was on about. How could I? I was hardly three! To say it was incomprehensible is putting it mildly.
Now that I am almost 70 it is no less incomprehensible. Louie Giglio rightly says it is "indescribable"! Then he is only scratching the surface of what our limited intellectual capacity can grasp. We hardly apprehend even the minutest sliver of the undefinable reality in which we “live and move and have our being”.
View Louie Giglio's "Indescribable"
I am presently engaged in a course in "Mathematical Philosophy" grappling with the notion of infinity. Needless to say I cannot even begin to wrap my mind round what the lecturer is trying to explain despite his assurance that high school math will suffice! I cannot even begin to comprehend the magnitude and magnificence of the universe. It defies our best descriptions and formulations.
The Psalmist exclaims...
The heavens declare the glory of God, the vault of heaven proclaims his handiwork, day discourses of it to day, night to night hands on the knowledge. No utterance at all, no speech, not a sound to be heard, but from the entire earth the design stands out, this message reaches the whole world. High above, he pitched a tent for the sun, who comes forth from his pavilion like a bridegroom, delights like a champion in the course to be run. (Psa 19:1-5 NJB)
As we know, our sun is but a star, one of many billions of stars. I once sat on Battery Beach in Durban with my teeny-bopper grandson, Dane. Taking a handful of beach sand in my hand with grains streaming through my fingers I asked, "Dane, how many grains of sand?" "Billions!" he replied. "And how many grains of sand on Battery Beach and all the beaches in our world?" I pressed. I knew he intended to become a marine biologist one day. "Uncountable!" he told me somewhat pleased with himself. I then said something stupid like, "Dane, do you know that there are more stars out there than all the grains of sand on the beaches of planet earth?" I didn't think I was exaggerating. Even John Wesley anticipated this great vastness when he wrote, "This assemblage of vast bodies is divided into different systems, the number of which perhaps exceeds the grains of sand which the sea casts on its shores" (John Wesley, Compendium of Natural Philosophy, Vol.IV, p.51). Totally befuddled and bewildered, all Dane could say was, "Bull!" That was pretty smart, I thought, an exclamation of sheer brilliance!
Dane was right. Later that night I pointed out to him the fascinating constellation of Taurus the Bull, rich in legend, myth, and religious tradition and significance which in ancient times marked the beginning of the course that our sun ran like a groom across the skies replete with "uncountable" stars. I pointed out the beautiful Pleiades in Taurus to which Dane's ancient Khoikhoi ancestors presented every new born Khoi baby. (See More Khoi Starlore...and Theology: The Pleiades.)
Age of Taurus the Bull
Equinox 4000BC (Stellarium)
The Sumerian high god Enki was referred to as "The Bull". The supreme deity of the Canaanites, El, was represented wearing a crown adorned with the horns of a bull. In the oldest of the Egyptian inscriptions, the Pyramid Texts, the king is addressed...
Behold, thou art the Enduring Bull of the wild bulls of the gods who are on earth...of the gods who are in the sky... Endure, O Enduring Bull, that you may be infinite in strength as the ruler of all, at the head of the spirits forever... (Quoted Robert Burnham, Burnham's Celestial Handbook, An Observer's Guid to the Universe Beyond the Solar System, Vol.3, p.1814)
In our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, there are estimated to be more than 100 billion stars! Many billion of these are "sun-like stars"
Carl Sagan also said, "Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours. In every one of them, there's a succession of incidence, events, occurrences which influence its future; countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time." (Cosmos, Episode 8, “Journeys in Space and Time” )
The Milky Way
Michael Moyer in Scientific American wrote:
Look up on a starry night. Almost every one of those tiny pricks of light is home to an unseen world. Our Milky Way galaxy is full of planets-100 billion or more-and many of those planets are Earth-like rocks (although our solar system still appears to be an oddball).
An estimated 17 billion. "Almost all sun-like stars have a planetary system," said Francois Fressin, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Fressin's research indicates that about one in six stars is home to a rocky, Earth-like planet.
We are just talking about our galaxy explains Michael Moyer....
John Johnson of the California Institute of Technology says that Red Dwarfs make up 70 percent of all stars in the galaxy, and these are absolutely full of planets. We can estimate that the Milky Way is home to at least 100 billion planets. "Our solar system is rare among the galaxy's population of planetary systems," says Johnson, "because our star is not a red dwarf." But with 100 billion possibilities to choose from, who would bet that there's one not like us peering back through that darkness?
It boggles the imagination. We can not even begin to appreciate the number of possible earth-like planets swirling around out there. However, there is more! There are universes, how shall we say? Universes within universes ad infinitum!
According to an article in National Geographic entire universes exist tucked away within so-called "black holes"! Our universe may be in such a hidden tuck of another. At our own galactic centre is a black hole too that could well be a portal to another universe!
Our Galactic Centre (Photo: NASA JPL)
A supermassive black hole resides in the bright white area, right of the center.
Ker Than writing for National Geographic News says, "Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe. In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe-from the microscopic to the supermassive-may be doorways into alternate realities.
This is a remarkable theory which, though Dane is now 21, I still hesitate even to mention to him!
The psalmist harps...
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. (Psa 8:3-5 KJV)
...and I begin to wonder and ask myself, "Who then are the angels, the "elohim," of whom the psalmist sings?" Clearly in his mind we are not alone in the universe, we cannot be the only form of intelligent life in a universe so indescribably and infinitely vast. If there be such diversity of “wonders undreamed of” out there, how much more then, the diversities of all the hosts of heaven and the imponderable “glories beyond description”!
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