3-4 I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,
your handmade sky-jewelry,
Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,
Why do you bother with us?
Why take a second look our way?
5-8 Yet we've so narrowly missed being gods,
bright with Eden's dawn light.
You put us in charge of your handcrafted world,
repeated to us your Genesis-charge,
Made us lords of sheep and cattle,
even animals out in the wild,
Birds flying and fish swimming,
whales singing in the ocean deeps.
9 GOD, brilliant Lord,
your name echoes around the world.
Earth in perspective
- Diameter of Earth: 8,000 miles
- Approximate number of species on Earth: 10m, with 6-7b individual humans inhabiting the biosphere
- Weight (more accurately, the mass) of Earth: 6E+24 (6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg)
- Area of Earth: 200m square miles
Universe in Perspective
- It takes 200m years for all of the stars in the Milky Way to rotate around the center of the galaxy.
- The Milky Way alone has 150-250b stars.
- There is a loose estimation of 50b galaxies in the known universe (according to NASA, it could be as much as 500b.)
- In a brief period of time, a supernova releases about as much energy as our own sun expels in an estimated 10b years.
- Assuming that other galaxies have star compositions like ours, the stars of the known galaxies outnumber all of the grains of sand on earth.
- The matter in the universe is so thinly dispersed that the universe can be compared with a building 20 miles long, 20 miles wide, and 20 miles high, containing only a single grain of sand.
Earth on a nano (billionth) scale:
- The Earth is .5" across (the size of a marble).
- The moon is .1" across (the size of a sesame seed) and is 1' from Earth.
- The sun is 5' across (the size of a cage ball) and is 500' from Earth.
- Jupiter is 6" across (the size of a tether ball) and is .5 miles from the sun.
- Pluto is 4 miles (the size of a small city) from the sun. (My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine... um...)
- The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 24,000 miles (the circumference of the Earth) away from the sun.
- On this scale, the speed of light is 1' per second.
Earth on a nano nano (billionth of a billionth) scale:
- The Earth would be about the size of an atom and entire solar system could not be seen by the naked eye.
- The nearest star would be 1.5" away from the sun and just the nearest galaxy, Andromeda would be 17 miles away.
- The Milky Way galaxy alone would be .5 miles wide.
A light year equals approximately 5,874,589,152,000 miles. The known horizon of the universe is 28b of these light years. Stuff that in your TI-83 and smoke it. That is just as how far as our best equipment can reach. This may only be a speck of the universe.
Isaiah 40:12 says that God measures the heavens with the breadth of his hand!
As immense and vast and immeasurable and intricate and extravagant and elegant and unfathomable as the universe is, the greatest phenomenon in all of space and time is that the creator notices me.
Although I cannot quantify the actual size of God because God exists outside of our concept of space, and beyond that, he is limitless, it is safe to say that my creator is HUGE.
"The Heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork."
- Psalm 19:1