Genesis 1
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Upon the earth He placed wonders and mysteries. And of course, man.
Humanity has reached a point in its evolution that we feel that we are ready to make the leap to begin trying to understand God’s first creation.
Ever since man first crawled out of his caves and looked up at the night sky he has dreamed of what might be out there. We have told stories of Gods and Demons that lived in the sky. We have imagined Galactic empires ruled by the benevolent and the wicked.
The positions of those lights were studied and pictures were painted by wise men and used to navigate by others. Some claimed to be able to read portents, and see the future. As we have learned about the universe around us, we have come to understand that we are really seeing the past.
Humanity has existed on this planet for something like 200,000 years, but it has been less than a thousand years that we have gotten away from the myths and stories that we told ourselves for so many years. Great thinkers (sometimes at the cost of their lives) proposed other explanations for all those tiny lights in the sky.
Slowly we have begun to understand that our world is but a tiny speck in a universe that is so vast that it defies understanding. Distances between stars are measured in the time it takes light to travel in a year. In a single year, light travels 9,460,730,472,580.8 km or approximately 5.88 trillion miles. Our nearest neighbor is 4.24 light years away.
Astronomers today tell us that the “observable” universe is something like 93 billion light-years in diameter. And most of that seems to be empty space. But it is not truly empty. There are also uncounted pieces of flotsam and jetsam adrift in the abyss between stars. A star explodes and throws mass in all directions. A planet is pulled from its orbit and flung into the vastness. One drifting rock impacts another and sends both in different directions. Every last speck of matter in the universe is in motion.
The Universe is thought to be about 13.7 billion years old. Probability and chaos are the only true constants. Given time and distance anything can happen anywhere.
There has been time enough, in this universe, for entire civilizations to rise, and to fall. Time enough to see the outcome of random events unfold with entirely unexpected results…