Creation has a way of making you feel small, doesn’t it? Last Sunday I was preaching on Psalm 8 and this fact hit me again. Compared to this universe, I am really pretty minuscule.
There are around 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone… give or take a few billion! Just last week scientists claimed to have mapped the universe to within 1% accuracy and believe they have counted over 1.2 million galaxies. 1.2 million x 400 billion. Do the maths… That’s a lot of noughts.How tiny does that make you feel?Light travels pretty quickly. In fact, it moves so fast it could orbit the earth 7.4 times every second. Imagine light setting off at that kind of speed in a straight line. One light year – the distance light travels in a year – is about 5.9 trillion miles. If you tried to walk a light year at an average pace of 20 minutes per mile, without stopping for food, rest or any other comfort break, it would take you 225 million years to complete your journey – and who’s got time for that? The average pair of shoes lasts 500 miles, which means you’d get through 11.8 billion pairs on your journey and the average adult burns 80 calories a mile so you’d need about 2 trillion energy bars to keep you going!In short, don’t bother…To give you an idea of distances, the sun is less than a light year away. A lot less. In fact, it takes light 8 minutes and 19 seconds to travel the distance from the Sun to the Earth. So if you set off on your light year journey you would reach the sun relatively quickly and then you’d be a bit disappointed after that because the next closest star to the sun is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.22 light years away from the sun. And in the grand scheme of things, 4.22 light years isn’t even very far, since scientists believe they have mapped the universe up to 6 billion light years away.How astonishingly minute does that make you feel?
