Life Contemplations

The pastor at the church where we attended Christmas Eve Service provided some, in my opinion, mind-blowing numbers about the universe.  To try to put the vastness of the universe into perspective, the example that he used was the following:

The distance from the Earth to the nearest star, which is our Sun, is 93 million miles.   If that distance was represented by the width/thickness of a sheet of paper, we would need a 70-foot stack of papers to represent the distance from our sun to the next closest star in our Milky Way Galaxy.  Furthermore, we would need a stack of papers 300 miles high to represent the distance from one end of our galaxy to the other end!  As crazy as that seems, according to astronomers, we have no idea how many galaxies exist, but we do know that there are thousands of them!!!

I don’t know about you, but that information makes me feel extremely insignificant in the big picture.  This place we call Earth is but a speck of dust in this immeasurable expanse we call the Universe.  I, as a human being on this earth, am, therefore, no more than a microscopic unit barely visible through its lens.

As Pastor Dave was talking I couldn’t help but go back to when I was a young boy, probably 8-9 years old – I guess I became a contemplator at a very young age.  I remember thinking to myself, “there’s got to be more for me than this little bit of time that I’m alive on this earth.”  I remember imagining a very long piece of string – one end representing the beginning of time and the other end representing the end of time.  I imagined a very tiny dot somewhere along the continuum of that string representing my time on Earth and thinking that I am here for such a very short time, there’s just got to be more to it all.  Then I would go to, “what’s going to happen to me when I die?”  Instinctively I kind of knew that even when I died, I wouldn’t just be gone.  But, eerily, I pictured myself in a very dark closet-like space all by myself and existing in that space for all eternity (there’s more to this story which I will likely share down the road).

But back to the vastness of the universe and the humbling realization that we are so insignificant in relation to its enormity.  I can only speak for myself, but who am I to think that I am anywhere close to having “it” all figured out?  Who am I to argue definitively about anything?  Is there a God that created the universe?  Did it all happen by chance?   Is there life on any other planet in our solar system; in our galaxy; in another galaxy?  Is there life beyond life as we know it?

A couple of other things to ponder in relation to the universe and our position in it:

• Planet Earth is the perfect distance away from the sun to make it inhabitable.  By a fairly small percentage, if the Earth’s orbit around the sun were to be a bit closer or farther, the Earth would be either too hot or too cold to inhabit.  Based on the statistics in the text above, what are the chances of the Earth being positioned just right for us as humans to inhabit and live on it?

• Two years ago, I was fortunate enough to experience one of the coolest things I have ever witnessed – a complete solar eclipse.  I had no idea what to expect and, quite honestly, I really wasn’t that interested.  But, when the time came, I was completely blown away as the sun fully disappeared behind the moon and the light in the middle of the day turned to darkness.  I later learned – again from Pastor Dave – that the only way for the phenomenon of a full solar eclipse to do what it does is because the moon is at a perfect distance away from the Earth to completely cover the sun during an eclipse.  Again, is this by some random chance, or another sign that something (or some being) put this whole thing together?

Would love to get some thoughts from others.