March 3, 2014 (Monday)
A familiar scene in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” shows the many stars in space whizzing by big windows in a room inside the huge starship, “Enterprise.” Actually, if you were in a spaceship with such big windows, you would see a star only occasionally, no matter how fast you traveled. That’s because space is so vast that everything in it is dwarfed by the emptiness.
Our solar system (the sun and its planets) is only a tiny part of the heavenly bodies we can see through our telescopes, or, for that matter, simply with the unaided eye. And yet, as small as our solar system is when compared to the vastness of space, it is quite huge. For example, if we were to somehow get hold of a giant beach ball the size of a two-story house, letting it represent our sun, placing it in the parking lot of the old vacant Wal Mart building on Business 35, then the earth would be the size of a tennis ball lying on the parking lot at the H.E.B. store, also on Business 35, nearly a half mile away. The huge planet, Neptune, farthest from the sun in our solar system, would be the size of a cantaloupe and would be in Ingleside, 15 miles away! The other planets would be placed at intervals between the sun and Neptune.
Small wonder, then, that Neptune was not discovered until 1846. It’s big, but far from earth.
Even though there are billions of celestial bodies out there, they are far from each other. My, oh my.
Long ago, the Psalmist wrote, ” O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens .. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8 NIV).