Reality to ponder

[Autodidact]

This is an image created using the Hubble telescope. It portrays a little piece of the sky--about 1/2,000,000 of our sky. It contains about 3000 individual galaxies. Each galaxy has between 10 million and a trillion stars, so this tiny corner of the universe has trillions of stars and trillions and trillions of miles of blank, dark, empty space, dotted with occasional massive collections of tremendous balls of glowing gas that we call stars. How many stars? Says NASA:

There are too many stars for scientists to actually count one-by-one, so other methods of estimating the total number of stars are used. We believe that there are on the order of 1021 stars in our Universe. If you write that number out, it looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This is a lot of stars!

Our home, earth, is a smallish ball of rock orbiting just one of those trillions and trillions of stars, midway along one of those galaxies.

I hope to discuss the theological implications of this, as well as some other relevant pictures, in this thread. Any preliminary thoughts?

[angellous_evangellous]

That's my favorite pic from Hubble.

Not much theological implications to me... I already knew that we were insignificant compared to God, yet by grace she cares about us. It's amazing.

Psalm 8.4 "What is man, that you are mindful of him..."

[Autodidact]

I agree, angellous, if you are devout, then these images have to evoke awe at the scope of creation. Here's a picture of just one galaxy:



That's what there are around 3000 of in that one tiny slice of the sky, 1/2,000,000 of our sky. Millions of these unimaginably huge and magnificent assemblages of glowing, burning stars. Makes you think, don't it?

[stephenw]

It inspires awe in me.

[Autodidact]

One more:



And what Dr. Carl Sagan said about it:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

[Autodidact]

Reality:
We are one of billions of species of organisms on the thin skin of a smallish ball of rock orbiting a huge ball of burning gas that is in turn one of billions of such balls in a single galaxy which is itself one of trillions of such galaxies in a vast, cold, dark, empty space. That's what we know about the world, looking at it from the long view.

[Polaris]

Great pictures.

This passage comes to mind from LDS scripture (Moses 1:33-35):

"And worlds without number have I created, and I also created them for mine own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten...

For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them."

[Autodidact]

So God, if any, is the unimaginable being behind this whole production.

[stephenw]

Originally Posted by Autodidact

So God, if any, is the unimaginable being behind this whole production.

To me, this unimaginable production is a manifestation of God.