Significance.
PRIORITIES
Many people believe this, and on one level, it’s hard to blame them. The
size of the universe overawes any who contemplate it.
According to scientists’ best estimates, the cosmos is 91 billion (that’s 91,000,000,000) light
years in diameter. A light year,
you may recall, equals, give or take, about 6 trillion (that’s 6,000,000,000,000) miles. Multiply
91 billion by 6 trillion and you get a round trip of 546 billion trillion miles.
It’s incomprehensible.
How
many stars are there? Astronomers estimate the presence of 10 trillion (or
10,000,000,000,000) galaxies like our own Milky Way, each with an average of 100
billion (or 100,000,000) stars, for a grand total of
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe.
By
contrast, our own solar system itself, with its single star—the sun—is a
comparative cosmic speck. Astronomers calculate its distance from the sun to the
Kuiper cliff—beyond which few objects have been detected—at 50 Astronomical
Units. One AU is 93 million (or 93,000,000) miles, the distance between the
earth and the sun. Fifty AU translates to 4.65 billion (or 4,650,000,000)
miles—a rather hefty jaunt.
Traveling at the speed of light—roughly 186,000 miles per second—it would
take you about seven hours to go from one end of our solar system to another.
(At that speed, it would take you over three years to reach Proxima Centauri, the
next closest star.)
And
keep in mind that flying at the speed of light—however many “Star Trek” reruns
we see—is a practical impossibility. It would take a spacecraft flying at 36,000
miles per hour—the fastest yet built—somewhere around 19 years just to traverse the length of
our solar system.
Given these “astronomical” distances and our own smallness next to them,
it’s no wonder that the late Carl Sagan once remarked, “We find that
we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star.” Yet new developments in
astronomy are actually leading us to a far different conclusion about our
significance in the cosmos.
No
less an authority than Howard A. Smith, a senior astrophysicist at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a
member of the Harvard Department of Astronomy, says so. In a fascinating article for the Washington Post, Smith says the
evidence shows that the earth, rather than being one unremarkable bit of rock
among “billions and billions” of others in the cosmic vastness, is instead an
incalculably precious jewel.
“We
seem to be cosmically special,” Smith states, “perhaps even unique—at least as
far as we are likely to know for eons.”
Smith cites two pieces of scientific evidence. The first, big bang
cosmology—the study of the universe’s origins and development—reveals that the
cosmos appears to be designed to accommodate human life.
“The universe, far from being a collection of random accidents, appears
to be stupendously perfect and fine-tuned for life,” Smith says. “The strengths
of the four forces that operate in the universe—gravity, electromagnetism, and
the strong and weak nuclear interactions (the latter two dominate only at the
level of atoms)—for example, have values critically suited for life, and were
they even a few percent different, we would not be here.”
Along these lines, Eric Metaxas, author of the bestseller “Miracles:
What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life,”
has noted a related point when it comes to planets being capable of supporting
life. Metaxas says a planet must fulfill more than 200 known conditions—such as
orbiting the right kind of star, at the proper distance, with just the right
tilt of the planet’s axis, with a massive neighboring planet like Jupiter to
protect it from killer asteroids—to be able to support life. Again, the odds are
simply “astronomical.”
“Yet here we are,” Metaxas says, “not only existing, but
talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many
parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that
science suggests that we cannot be the result of random
forces?”
One
way we know about the uniqueness of the earth is by studying planets that orbit
other stars. These exoplanets, Smith’s second line of evidence, are being
discovered in ever-increasing numbers by ever-improving technology. But rather
than displaying earthlike environments conducive to life, these exotic
exoplanets reveal how special earth conditions really are.
“Many have highly elliptical orbits around unstable stars, making
evolution over billions of years difficult if not impossible,” Smith says.
“Other systems contain giant planets that may have drifted inward, disrupting
orbits; and there are many other unanticipated properties.”
For
his part, Smith believes we might be “alone in the universe,”
and that therefore life here on earth has special significance. “All the
observations so far,” he says, “are consistent with the idea that humanity is
not mediocre at all and that we won’t know otherwise for a long time. It seems
we might even serve some cosmic role.”
The
Christmas season, of course, emphatically proclaims:
- that human beings are not alone but have been visited by a cosmic Intelligence far surpassing our own;
- that we are not mediocre but have been forever dignified by a Savior who deigned to take on our flesh; and
- that we are not insignificant but have a cosmic role, “to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.”
So the next time you hear that the universe proves our insignificance, don’t believe it. It’s a claim disproved by both science and Scripture. As the Psalmist said:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
Image courtesy of losw at
Thinkstock by Getty Images.
Stan Guthrie, a
licensed minister, is editor at large for the Chuck Colson Center for Christian
Worldview and for Christianity Today. Stan blogs at www.stanguthrie.com. His
latest book is God’s Story in 66 Verses: Understand the Entire Bible by Focusing on Just
One Verse in Each Book.
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