the night sky is a great equalizer for
humanity no matter who you are or what
your background is when you stand
beneath the night sky looking out into
the vast darkness of the heavens our
humanity experiences a sense of awe and
is filled with wonder when we consider
what is beyond the Stars the mere
existence of space conveys a necessary
pre-existing cause but our cosmos is not
merely a small assemblage of space
rather it is vast reaching distances
that boggle the mind come with me on a
quick journey to explore the size and
scale of the cosmos marked out by the
matter that fills it beginning with the
region that surrounds us we see the
scale of our everyday lives those
aspects of our lives on earth
commonplace to us as we expand out we
see that our own planet has terrain and
topography forests and waterways and
differing habitats for life beyond the
mountain ranges in landforms we find the
structure of continents and oceans that
compose the entire globe of our planet
at this point our field of view is only
about ten thousand miles wide and while
it encompasses everything that comprises
our lives we are only seeing one object
in space moving away from Earth we see
our nearest neighbor the moon come into
view at a distance of 240,000 miles this
rocky airless body is our nearest
neighbor and is the brightest object in
the night sky by the time our field of
view includes the Sun the nearest star
to earth we are able to see the orbits
of the two innermost planets Mercury and
Venus located about 50 million miles
outside of Earth’s orbit we find our
neighbor Mars the red planet and
thereafter we see the asteroid belt
forming the boundary separating the
orbits of the inner terrestrial planets
from the orbits of the
outer gas giants Jupiter Saturn Uranus
and Neptune we have now reached a field
of view encompassing all of our solar
system out to the dwarf planet Pluto in
its several moons our field of view at
this point is almost 7.5 billion miles
yet only contains one star eight planets
a few dwarf planets asteroids and comets
it is not until we have many stars in
view that we even begin to see that
there are large clouds of gas called
nebulas that become visible continuing
to accelerate outward we see the
structure of our own Milky Way galaxy
with its spiral arms encircling a dense
nucleus our field of view is now 100
thousand light-years now we are viewing
distant points of light which are not
stars but are large collections of stars
gases and dust known as galaxies each of
these galaxies likely contains billions
of stars like the one our planet orbits
every year finally at the largest scales
to the universe we see that even
galaxies are organized into groups
clusters and superclusters seeing the
cosmos from its smallest to its largest
scales we get a view of just how vast it
is when we consider all that is beyond
the stars is it reasonable to conclude
that everything we observe is merely the
result of chance and chaos or that a
random unguided non intelligent origin
provides the greatest explanatory power
for why we are here few people in their
lifetimes will travel very far around
our single planet rather we expend much
of our energy and our intellect to build
shelters for our families buildings for
our communities and infrastructure for
our countries we recognize that the
physical structures around us require
intelligence and design
and effort but these man-made structures
pale in comparison to the physical
structures that exist and populate our
entire universe their existence requires
the same recognition that is that we
inhabit a grand cosmos created by an
intelligence of such greater proportion
than even the size and scales we see
you
