Gloriously Huge Universe

Several years ago I was debating the existance of God in an online forum. The debate was pointless, as my opponent was quick to draw arbitrary "micro-evolution, not macro-evolution" lines and resort to the inerrancy of the bible to 'prove' his point of view. He was a young-earther, too. Even though the debate stagnated after a while, there was one topic I had delivered, about which I was never able to extract a response. I posted one picture, and he put a full stop on all efforts he had been making in that direction. It was a nice moment for me. What was the topic, and what was my response?

As I stated, my opponent was a young-earther. I asked how, then, were we able to see light from stars millions of light years away? Did he not believe in the speed of light? No, he responded, the speed of light was fine. But the methods used to measure the distances to the stars were 'unreliable,' and that they were in fact much closer than we had been led to believe. This was when I struck.

Then how, I asked, do you explain the Hubble Deep Field image? I included a link to the hi-res image, and pointed out that, save for a few foreground stars, every glob of light in that image represented an entire galaxy of stars. And, if they were all within 6000 light years of us, how could the individual stars in these galaxies exist, considering they must be much smaller than a star needs to be in order to maintain nuclear fusion, and how would it have enough gravity to withstand being blown up by the nuclear energy?

This was what I couldn't get a response to. There is just something very compelling about a good visual.

The original Hubble Deep Field image (hires version here) was a snapstop of a tiny piece of the sky, like looking through a tiny keyhole. If you were to look up at the night sky, the little window this was taken from would be about the size of a dime -- held 75 feet away. And it showed more than 1,500 entire galaxies. What is really incredible is that the entire universe is like this, in all directions.

The image at the right is a more recent image, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image (breathtaking hires version here). This image was taken from a section of the sky about 1/10 the diameter of the moon, over an exposure lasting 1,000,000 seconds. It reveals more than 10,000 galaxies. Aside from the foreground stars, these are all entire galaxies with billions of stars each.

It should again be noted that this is typical throughout the sky. That means that, lurking behind the moon, is at least 1,000,000 entire galaxies. And the full moon only takes up about half of 1/1000th of 1% of the full sky (360 degrees, north and south hemisphere), or 1/200,000th of the sky. Which results in roughly 200,000,000,000 galaxies that would be, barring any obstruction, visible from the Hubble telescope at a similar acuity as the HUFD.

Folks, that's one big universe.

The next step is to try to picture how big a galaxy is. A new image from Hubble shows exactly that. It is the highest detailed image of galaxy M81 (Bode's Galaxy, about 12 million light years away, shown left) ever taken. Fabulous hires version here. Yes, every single little pinpoint of light is a star. In the center they are so dense and the galaxy is so thick that they cannot be distinguished from one another. I don't even have to calculate how many stars that is, you can just see for yourself. (I've heard that 150 billion stars is average for a galaxy)

Another neat demonstration of how big the universe is -- by showing how small we are, is here in a series of image. First, the earth compared to the other rocky planets (and Pluto). Then to the rest of the planets. Then to the sun. Then the sun is compared to other normal stars. And finally, to the very largest stars. Earth grows invisible very quickly.

I don't want to write a complete rehash of my last post on nature -- but doesn't it feel just wonderful seeing how big the universe is? How could anyone possibly believe they are "God's chosen people" after seeing how amazingly tiny we are?

The Natural World

The long and tiring move is over, and we are finally getting settled in to our new house. It is a log house on two acres with a terrific view right out of the big glass doors to my home office area. We've traded the sounds of traffic and sirens to birds and cows. Indeed, while I frequently listened to music while working, lately I've been keeping the music off and just enjoying the birdsong. When we are out driving, it is not traffic we are weaving around, it is mountains. I can look up at night and see more than twenty stars. Thousands, on clear nights. Our house, at night, actually gets dark! There are no street lights outside the window, just moonlight. In short, we are living in nature, and nature is spectacular.

So why ... ruin it by making up stories about a creator that fiddled around and whipped up the whole thing in six days? That makes it sound so trivial. So mundane. So ... disenchanting. My nature was the product of several billion years of refinement. It has matured, like a fine wine. It is mysterious and wonderful because I don't assume that it happened for a reason, or at the hand of a master designer. Because I don't assume that human beings have lived on this planet but for a fraction of a percent of its existance.

I love driving in rural areas, especially ones that are new to me. I frequently get urges (so far unmet, but one of these days...) to stop the car and run up a hill to an isolated spot. I want to sit down right there, and wonder if any other human being had ever sat down right there before, or was I the first? And to think of all of the animals that had been right there, and what kind of lives had they lived, and sights they had seen. To think of all the strange plants and creatures that had been right there, but have long been extinct. Wouldn't the concept of somebody actually creating that spot ruin that feeling? Wouldn't the unconscionable brevity of the creation story of existence minimize the wonder of the ages past?

We are not the product of evolution, of course. Evolution doesn't work like that -- there is no destination. But we are undeniably part of the same wonderous device that is evolution, and therefore part of the same wonderous machine that is our universe. In the vast set of equations that are silently being perfomed every time two people fall in love, or whenever the weakest antelope falls prey to the lion, or when baby sea turtles fight their way across the beach, or as the tree with the strongest roots survives the storm, or when a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo...we are part of the system. What is more, we are only particularly special because we are aware of the system, and we are slightly more influential in the system than most of the other creatures on this planet. Which is to say, completely ineffective on a solar scale, much less universal.

In the immortal Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, Douglas Adams (an atheist, thanks to Richard Dawkins) envisioned that the perfect punishment was to be given awareness of how small and insignificant one really was in the universe. I don't believe this would effect many atheists. Myself, I rather like feeling that I am only a tiny part of the universe, because it means there is so much else out there to learn. But for many theists, this might indeed be the perfect torture. After all, theist mythology was born from a world that was very small, from the point of view of its inhabitants, and it hasn't developed as much as it might have since then.

But as humanity and human knowledge has grown, so has our awareness of the world. Believing that the universe was created by one being, let alone within a week, and that all of the animals on the planet could co-exist, much less fit, on a boat for more than a year, is shrinking the amazing universe we live in to an unappreciably small existance. Would the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel be nearly as awe inspiring if it was painted on the head of a pin? No.

The only way to truly appreciate the grandeur and splendour of the universe is by not taking it for granted. By explaining away our existence in just a few of pages in Genesis, we are making up answers to questions that deserve a lot more attention. A lot more ... reverence.