Thursday, November 26, 2009

Deepest Bore hole and the skin of an apple.

The deepest hole ever dug by humans was around 12 kilometers deep. Relative to the size of the earth, that is approximately the same as taking a pin and poking a hole just through the skin of an apple but no further. Bearing in mind that 12KM is deeper than all the mines, all the oil drilling holes, the grand canyon...everything.

Also bear in mind the average thickness of the atmosphere is 60 Kilometers or so, although nothing really lives past 12 Kilometers. The highest you'll fly in a commercial jet is well under 12 Km.

So we exist in an incredibly thin film on the surface of our planet. All life as we know it evolved in this incredibly insignificant wisp of a layer of nothing on the surface of the earth.

Then, going further, if you could combine the mass of all the planets in our little solar system wayy out on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, the Sun would account for 99.8% of that mass. So including Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Uranus, Venus, Mercury, pluto, the asteroid belt, and Earth...all that accounts for .2% of the mass of the solar system, which, by the way, is a completely unnoticed nothing on the edge of a galaxy with 100-400 BILLION stars in it. So if the milky way "shed" our solar system like our bodies shed skin cells, it would amount to losing a few dozen cells or so.

Why would God go to so much trouble to create something so impossibly gigantic compared to this tiny species on a tiny planet in the middle of nowhere? Is he a "god of waste"? Why not simply make a few lights for night, a nice big light for day, and call it done? Saying we are literally designed by God is like saying a designer would make an entire city, no, country just to house a single ant farm, with the ants oblivious to most of it.

Another interesting point is...if you were as big as the Milky Way, which, by the way is only one of billions of galaxies in the visible universe, it would take you 100,000 years to "see" your feet. Yes, its 100,000 light years across, so if you could see your feet, you would be seeing them as they were 100,000 years ago. Talk about delayed messages.

Again, I ask...why would God make things so impossibly far away like that? Its entirely unnecessary. We could have a beautiful night sky full of stars less than a few dozen light years away and have practically the same effect of "night lights". But instead, to make an entire universe just for some "night lights" for humans on an insignfiicant planet seems like the very height of hubris, the very height of arrogance.

What is more likely is the universe is billions of years old, it is massive, and we evolved on our own out here and dont amount to more than a tiny blip in the scale of the universe. We are guests in its house, not the other way around, and we need to show it the proper respect it deserves by ending our hubris to believe our tiny, imaginary gods had anything to do with it.

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