Blog

by Roy Leon (aka Leo)

Reading Genesis, as we all do from time to time, it still puzzles me after all these years. I have been pondering many of its enigmas for more years that I care to recall.

I have worked in the Space Industry, contracted to the European Space Agency for the Cinal [Ed. ?] , for 25 years of my working life. I have learned that our planet is one of 8 orbiting our sun, our sun being quite a small star.

Our own Solar system is enormous by human standards. With present day propulsion systems we can reach the moon in 3 days, Mars in 3 months, Pluto in 3 years. And that is not yet the edge of our Solar system. There is still very much further to go before we reach the Oort Cloud of dust and fragments of ice and rock. On this scale we are no more that a grain of sand in the Sahara.

We exist in a vast Galaxy which we call the Milky Way, consisting of an estimated 400 billion stars. Many of them are infinitely bigger than our own little sun. The nearest Solar system to ours is called Alpha Centauri (Proxima) just 4.3 Light years away and at today’s speed attained by or Chemical propulsion methods , i.e. 60,000 km per hour, it would take us approx. 35,000 years to reach our nearest Stellar neighbour in our vast Galaxy.

It is vast because it is estimated at 100,000 light years across. And yet this is only one of countless billions of Galaxies, all consisting of countless billions of stars. Astrophysicists are confdent that all of these stars have a family of planets orbiting around them, as this is the very nature of the formation of these stars. It seems very obvious that of these billions of stars, some will have planets orbiting at a specific distance that is not too close and not too far away, that will enable liquid water to exist. These are called Exoplanets, that is Planets that are within the Goldilocks Zone (from an old English Fairy Story). This being the case there must be countless billions of such planets in existence. NASA has already located more than 6,000 such exoplanets, nearby in our own Galaxy, The Milky Way.

Liquid water is a necessity for life and there is every possibility that such planets will indeed support life, whether it is just in a bacteriological form or even more sophisticated life forms. Consider the possibility of intelligent life on some of them, just 1% would equate to millions of civilizations. Hopefully, they are more sensible than the civilizations that exist on our tiny planet.

Having gained this insight from working in the space Industry, I have a few observations…

[to be continued]