Rare Earth
A mere glance at the stars invites the question, “Are we
alone?” — one of the ultimate facing mankind. Not long
ago astronomer Carl Sagan thought there were a million advanced
civilizations in the Milky Way alone. But astrobiologists, men
who look for life in other solar systems, and scientists are painting
a far different picture. Once thought to be average, our planet,
sun, and galaxy are anything but. Heavier than 95% of the stars
in the Milky Way, the sun is both metal-rich and life-friendly.
It has been a stable source of radiant heat for literally billions
of years, releasing most, but not all of its radiation in the
safe, visible light portion of energy. More energetic stars would
release too much ultraviolet radiation, tearing apart the biological
bonds of living creatures. Less energetic ones would be so small
that the habitable zone around them, the orbits where water can
exist on a planet, would be too close to them.
Our friendly sun is surrounded by an orderly array of planets
with nearly circular orbits. If they had more eccentric orbits
that brought them closer to the sun, gas giants like Jupiter would
drive the inner, earth-like planets right into it. A massive moon,
both lovely and useful, orbits our beautiful earth. It has kept
the tilt of the earth constant for hundreds of millions of years,
stabilizing the earth’s surface temperatures in ranges suitable
for life. The molten core of the Earth makes possible its great
shield against solar and deep space radiation — its magnetic
field. Its oceans, oxygen-rich atmosphere, and mighty upheavals
of its crust to form continents — all have played their part
in supporting life. Even the earth’s rotation has played
a role. Planets like Mercury, locked into presenting one side
to the sun, have an unchanging freezing cold half and a boiling
hot half on the same planet. Any one of these features would make
our earth and solar system uncommon; together, they make it unique.
In spite of everything going for it, life on planet Earth, according
to the fossil record, has faced extinction no less than 15 times
in the last five hundred million years. Five of these “mass
extinction events” have eliminated more than half of all
the species then inhabiting our planet. One of the most spectacular,
65 million years ago, ended the reign of the dinosaurs on planet
Earth. A comet or asteroid only 6 to 10 kilometers in diameter
struck the earth in Central America, darkening the skies for months
with the dust of the explosion, the billowing black smoke of forest
fires ignited worldwide, and a prodigious fall of acid rain. One
just twice that size might well have sterilized the entire planet.
The moon bears mute witness to the power of even larger impacts.
Much of the universe is actually inhospitable to life ever arising.
Besides such spectacular events as stars going supernova, many
regions of the universe are either too energy-rich or too metal-poor
to ever support advanced life. And then there are events of a
magnitude that men have never before dreamed, like mergers of
two neutron stars, which cause the most powerful explosions in
the universe and release enough energy to sterilize an entire
galaxy!
Yes, we are alone. The universe is inhospitable for man
now. It is waiting, groaning under the futility of so many
stars, shining on so many lifeless planets, all of them
alike subject to the same death and decay that faces men
and women today, on this planet.
But there is a secret more vast and more significant than
the death of neutron stars: man was never meant to die.
Man was always meant to fill this planet with peace and
life and take that to the stars. The many wars of science
fiction are quite accurate – if man could go to the
stars in the future he would just bring the war, the pollution,
and his moral degradation there. But planet Earth is under
a quarantine until the deep-seated problems within men and
women are dealt with. It is not just a quarantine of distance;
it is deeper than that – it is a quarantine of uniqueness.
There are no other earth-like planets where we can live.
But the day will come when the uninhabitable universe will
be transformed and made habitable.
It is beyond our highest imagination.
That is the hope that we have — a hope for the world that
we found in Messiah Yahshua. His forgiveness of our sins makes
possible a life of peace and friendship, not only between men
and women, but between humanity and their precious cradle of life
– the earth. The only true contribution you can make to solve
the earth’s problems is to surrender the life you now live
(whose wealth is causing all of the problems – including
war) to the One who can save both you and the planet. He will
one day return to destroy those who are destroying the Earth.
You can be on His side today and in the ages to come, when human
life will fill the universe in unending generations, forever and
ever.
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