I love it when my peanut butter & chocolate go together, and by peanut butter & chocolate, I mean science & theology.
Remember this post? Particularly point #5?
Here's an interesting science news item from a few days back...
A few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way. So argues an international team of scientists led by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, UK...
The scientists have proposed that these life-bearing planets originated in the early Universe within a few million years of the Big Bang, and that they make up most of the so-called "missing mass" of galaxies. The scientists calculate that such a planetary body would cross the inner solar system every 25 million years on the average and during each transit, zodiacal dust, including a component of the solar system's living cells, becomes implanted at its surface. The free-floating planets would then have the added property of mixing the products of local biological evolution on a galaxy-wide scale.
The idea that there's a lot of real estate floating around loose between the stars is not a new one.
This is the first time, however, that it's been suggested that life itself originated with the universe, and was not simply a random byproduct.
Which leads me to ask the $64 trillion dollar question: Is the Universe as we know it simply the byproduct of the creation of Life?
God, through His son and the prophets, constantly reminds us that the least shall be greatest.
Cosmologists are quick to remind us "that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people" and ask "if we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?"
With all due respect, I think they have it backwards.
We, who are physically among the least in the Universe, are the very reason it exists at all, and long after this Universe is swept away, we will just be beginning the great task that we were created for.
There is a very real possibility that the span between the stars is not the vast ocean of emptiness we thought but a series of (relatively) small hops.
Step by step is how life spreads: From this valley to the next, from this island to another. Humanity is not confined to this system; there are countless worlds beyond on which to build way stations.
We've been looking at travel to the stars through the wrong set of lenses.
We should stop thinking about flying by jet and start thinking of getting there by stagecoach.
Who cares how long it takes as long as we get there?
As they say in the song:
"Who gives a damn? We're on our way!"