A Majestic Tour of the Universe

I took a tour of the universe the other day. It is breathtaking times jaw-dropping times awesome.

My love of the stars has been requited incrementally over the years. Where I grew up in Washington State, the night sky was largely obscured by towering pines—though my scrambles up onto the roof of our house opened up the view somewhat. I remember trips to the coast, where the canopy of stars stretches clear down to the flat, inky horizon. On a visit to the Wisconsin farmlands as a teenager, lying on my back in a field on a crystal-clear night, for the first time, I saw—no, felt—the entire dome of the heavens all at once. It was three-dimensional—an incomprehensibly enormous fishbowl of shimmering limitlessness.

As I drank in that view, I was probably seeing fewer than 5,000 stars.

I remember when I first saw Hubble Deep Field. That is the image scientists produced in 1995 when they aimed the Hubble Space Telescope at a nearly empty speck of sky, the size of a dime from 75 feet away—and took 342 long exposures over 10 days. By concentrating so intensively on such a small area, that telescope captured light emissions nearly 4 billion times fainter than your eye can see. Within that pinprick of space, astronomers found nearly 2,500 galaxies. They estimated that the light that Hubble picked up from the most distant of these galaxies left its source over 10 billion years ago. At this revelation, they adjusted their previous estimates as to the number of galaxies in the universe upward significantly: somewhere north of 100 billion—even up to a few trillion. Keep in mind: A galaxy has a lot of stars; ours has at least 200 billion. I stared at Deep Field for long stretches, trying to wrap my mind around what it revealed of our universe.

I had an even greater revelatory experience when I downloaded Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope onto my laptop. This thing is unbelievable.

The geniuses at Microsoft Research have seamlessly stitched virtually every eye-popping image of space ever produced into a single multi-dimensional map and created an elegant interface whereby you can explore it all easily. You can set your vantage point to your own backyard and see what the night sky would look like all around you at this exact second if it were pitch dark and there were no obstructions—and then zip out and around at will, chasing anything that interests you, moving at millions of times the speed of light.

If nasa installed the Hubble telescope at your house, you couldn’t see even a fraction as much so quickly—and it wouldn’t come with a zoom lens, either. At your computer, you can plunge toward a tiny speck—or even what looks like utter blackness—and rush up to meet a bright blue planet, then zoom on into the deep, passing crystalline stars, cratered moons, and technicolor molecular and radiation clouds as you wheel and bank through the wonderful, deep vastness. It’s not only awesome, it’s real: The location of every star, galaxy, planet and object is as accurate as if you were looking through a real telescope. Crunching hundreds of trillions of bytes of information from the best observatories all over the world, this application provides a unified perspective of the relationships between all we know of the objects in the night sky: what is near or far, large or small, spectacular or utterly breathtaking, how they’re all related—and how infinitesimally tiny we are.

Now, I was excited by Google Earth, which enables you to fly around our gem of a planet, swooping in and out like some kind of supersonic hummingbird, drinking in all the sights. But the WorldWide Telescope is Google Earth times infinity.

A lot of people share my fascination with the cosmos. It almost seems hardwired into us to look up—and start asking questions. What is all this about? How did we get here? Where do we, specks on a pea floating in an ocean, fit in the grand scheme? Are we alone?

Many scientists believe they have some answers. They theorize that the entire material universe—from its minutest intricacies to its most jaw-dropping immensity—all started from nothing and evolved to its present state by chance. In this view there is no purpose, no reason, no meaning, no hope. They can tell you quite a lot about the material aspects of what they see—they will even go to enormous lengths to lay all the information out for you to explore from your laptop. But when it comes to the big questions, their answer is that there is no answer.

Those who believe in God, on the other hand, acknowledge design and art in all that astral beauty. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork,” wrote David the psalmist. Oh, if only he could have seen the WorldWide Telescope. The deeper we travel into those heavens and the more of His handiwork we see, the more spectacular that glory reveals itself to be.

But the question remains: Why? What was God’s intent for creating such an unfathomably vast universe? Is it all for show? Or does He actually plan to use it? Few people—even the very religious—could give you much of an answer to that very legitimate question.

But an answer exists—and it is plainly revealed in the Bible!

God’s Word shows that not only did God create the universe, He has mastery over it (read, for example, Job 38:31-33). He not only made all the stars, He has a name for every one of them (Psalm 147:4; read also Isaiah 40:26). Yes, God is deeply excited about the universe, and is intent on putting it to use.

What use? Here is the answer: “For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the Lord; and there is none else” (Isaiah 45:18). God formed the universe to be inhabited! He doesn’t intend for it to remain mere pictures for us to gawk at, sitting empty forever. He wants to populate it with life.

How? With whom? These are valid, important questions—and they have solid answers. Those answers are not myth or religious speculation. In fact, they are directly related to the gospel message brought to this Earth by Jesus Christ two millennia ago.

If you want to see those answers plainly revealed within the pages of your own Bible—if you want to know the true purpose for and meaning of the impressive, infinite universe we inhabit—if you want to be deeply inspired by the future that awaits those trillions of galaxies, and to understand how human beings play a most critical role in that future—then order a copy of Herbert W. Armstrong’s book The Incredible Human Potential. We would be happy to send you a free copy to hold, to study, to mark up.

I thank the scientists at Microsoft Research for providing this thrill ride for the imagination. Coupled with the revelation of what God intends to do with it all in the future, this star lover is looking forward to many hours of awed happiness—exploring infinity, contemplating eternity.