What Lies Beyond the Edge of Our Universe?

Ir might seem that we can see out to the "end" of the universe with our largest telescopes. But we can't. It's important to remember that because light has a finite speed (186,000 miles per second), as we peer out into space we are actually looking back in time. Even when we look at the surface of the sun, we see it as it was eight minutes ago, because it takes eight minutes for its light to reach us. As we look at nearby galaxies we see them as they were millions of years ago -- not as they are today. Because of this, and the fact that the universe (according to the Biog Bang hteory) has a finite age, we only see out to a distance of 42 billion light years. There is, in fact, no way we can see beyond this distance. Does this mean there is "nothing" beyond this distance? No, it doesn't. It's quite likely that there is more universe -- more galaxies, more stars, more planets, and more aliens beyond it. But they are  in another universe as far as we are concerned.

How many of these "other universes" exist? There may well be an infinite number; astronomers still do not know.

Barry Parker, Ph. D., author of "Learn from Yesterday, Live for Today, Hope for Tomorrow"

Does a Universe Without Any Life in it Make Any Sense?

An interesting question. Would a universe without any life in it make any sense? It doesn't seem like it would. Why would it be here? What would its role be? We can take this one step further. Considering how unbelievably large our universe is, does it make any sense that we are the only life in it? We know that life will evolve naturally if the conditions are right. All you need is proper temperatures, a reasonable atmosphere with oxygen and water, and life would eventually appear. It would be a long way from advanced life as we know it, but still it would be life. Furthermore, we know that this life would evolve and develop into a higher form. With survival of the fittest this only makes sense. But I'll admit it's a long ways from very primitive forms of life to an advanced form like us, but time is on the side of the advancing forms. Millions, even  hundreds of millions of years are but a blink of the eye when we're talking about the universe. What does all of this mean?

We have discovered dozens of planets in our tiny corner of the universe, and some of them have conditions that are "almost" satisfactory for life. If we extrapolate this to the rest of our galaxy with it 200 billions stars we should have at least hundreds of millions of planets, and if only one in a thousand have conditions satisfactory for life we'll still have thousands of planets that could contain life.
And I'm talking only about our galaxy. There are at least 200 billion galaxies out there. It's unlikely that we will every be able to communicate with the life in other galaxies because of their tremendous distances, but that doesn't mean that they're not there. And, of course, there is the possibility that one day we'll discover a way to get through to them. Anyway, it gives you a lot to think about.

Barry Parker, author of "Learn from Yesterday, Live for Today, Hope for Tomorrow

Was the Universe Created Just for Us?

One of the really interesting questions in science and religion is "Was the universe created just for us?" Years ago when the Bible was written, and for many years after, it was blasphemous to even pose the question. Everyone believed the universe was created for us -- there was no question about it. Furthermore, we were the center of the universe -- everything revolved around us in more ways than one. As astronomy developed and we learned more and more about our universe, however, it became obvious that we were not the center of the universe, and it now seems very unlikely that the universe was, indeed, made just for us. The main reason we can say this is that we now know how big the universe is, and we know we are a mere speck in it. Furthermore, as far as I'm concerned (and I'm sure most astronomers would agree with me) the probability that there is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe is very large -- close to 100 percent.

We also have to ask that if God created the universe just for us, why did He make it so big? It is, indeed, so big, that we haven't really found an edge to it yet. And there's the problem that if we did find an "edge" we would have to answer the question "What is on the other side of this edge?"
To give you an idea how big our universe is, consider the following. We live in a galaxy we call the Milky Way, and it has approximately 200 billion stars in it (about equal to all the grains of sand in all the beaches on Earth), with our Sun being an average-sized, relatively cool star. And the overall universe has at least 200 billion galaxies in it (one for each of the stars in our galaxy). Of course, we're not sure  how many galaxies there actually are out there -- but we know it is at least 200 billion. And that makes it a pretty big place. This brings  us back to the question: Was the huge universe created just for us? It 's hard to believe that it was. Let me know if you think differently, or have a good argument for the fact that it was.


Barry Parker:  Webpage: Barryparkerbooks.com. My most recent book is "Learn from Yesterday, Live for Today, Hope for Tomorrow"