Contemplating The Universe

Last month’s calendar photo was taken from the Hubble Space Telescope and showed, perhaps, hundreds of galaxies. That figure barely counts, almost does not show up, on a count of all the galaxies that exist. Recently, astronomers discovered two million galaxies they’d never seen before, and that number itself makes absolutely no difference in the count.

As far as we can tell, our universe holds some three hundred billion galaxies. The star count on each is a guess; ours varies from (choose your star-gazer) two hundred billion to four hundred billion.

Take all these galaxies, all these stars, all these planets and you’ve just got to have all kinds of conscious life-forms scattered through the universe. There just can’t be one totally egocentric “God created all this just for us” people; the universe has to be full of civilizations saying the same thing.

When you look at the immensity of space and creation, it makes you wonder if beings on this planet really suffered eternally for eating animal protein on a certain spin of the planet during a particular number of rotations around its sun.

Or if one of their ultimate religious leaders, who claimed dominion over the entire universe, was little more than one step ahead of a guy with a bone thru his nose, a rattle in one hand and a some magic reeds in the other.