The (mostly) empty universe

Throughout much of human history, where science could not answer questions we would fill in the blanks with myth. Old Norse mythology claimed that our world was sand witched between various others containing mythical entities such as Aesir or Dwarves. Greek mythology had our world carried on the shoulders of the Titan Atlas, whose name to this day refers to maps of our planet. Taoism has Pangu, the de facto creator of the Earth, pushing the ground and the sky apart before becoming the various elements of our universe, including the wind, stars, sun and moon. Whether or not any of these stories provoke a feeling of grandeur and untold complexity, the truth of the matter is they are, in cosmological terms, remarkably stunted. None of them even hint at the utter vastness of our Universe. Many of these creation myths seem content with describing the creation of the Earth as a one-time deal, without any mention of other planets, and stars an arbitrary element without real purpose.

Cosmology and the observation of our Universe, even on a local scale, has produced a reality that no creation myth comes close to describing. To say that our planet is small in comparison to the Universe at large would be a gross understatement. If one were to make an analogy, if the Universe were represented somehow in terms of the Earth itself, our planet wouldn't even be the smallest part of the smallest element of the smallest atom. Our Universe is vast, more vast than any one human could possibly comprehend. It is not inconceivable to assume that if every human were to document each inch of the sky in terms of stars, planets and so on, we wouldn't have covered a fraction of what was present in the Universe by the time we died.

In this sense, the idea that Earth was created specifically by God for the purpose of his divine plan is in many ways ridiculous. Talk to any believer and more often as not they will recount to you just how significant our small planet really is, how is it the only planet that God has seen to grace with life. Looking beyond the fact we've yet to find hard evidence of sentient life in the Universe, taking this viewpoint when considering the Universe at large takes a mind-bogglingly rejection of basic facts.

The amount of redundancy, according to Theists, is staggering on a scale that is difficult to communicate. Let's start out small; consider our own solar system. Arguments on the status of Pluto or other bodies as planets or not aside, it is clear to us that there are other planets currently orbiting our Sun. On clear nights at the right times of year with telescopes you can easily confirm this yourself, with both Venus and Mars clearly visible. However many planets there may be around our Sun, it is clear only one houses life at present; Earth. Currently there are theories that life may be present on Mars in certain underground caverns, and the icy waters of Io, one of the satellites of Jupiter, may prove fruitful. Even evidence of simple bacterial life was found in meteorites from Mars. When considering the necessary unique construction of our planet as sole benefactor to human life, one has to take a long think as to what possible purpose the other planets might serve in a Theistic world. Certainly they were never intended for us to live on, given their considerably hostile environments compared to our own. Their gravitational fields have no effect to us on Earth, and we never come close enough to their orbit for them to have any real significance. In short, the other planets in our solar system, as is the life that was once, and could still be present, on Mars, are redundant.

Head out a bit further, to other stars in our galaxy. Our Sun is just one of many stars clumped together in a galaxy formation. The amount of stars in a single galaxy is difficult to give a precise number for, but estimates put it between two hundred billion and four hundred billion stars. Attempting to convey just how vast a number that is is difficult for humans, because we rarely have to deal with numbers so large. To put it into some kind of context, with the most conservative estimate possible of two hundred billion, if one were to count from one to this number, and each number took a second to say, it would take approximately six thousand, three hundred and thirty seven years to finish counting. While not every star in our galaxy would have planets, there is still the problem of what purpose the huge amount of other stars would serve given we get all of our needed heat and light from our Sun already. The approximate percentage redundancy of stars in our universe, if you consider our star to be the only significant one, is 99.99999999995%.

Now let's consider the rest of the Universe, namely all the other galaxies. While we cannot say for certain how many galaxies exist given that what we can observe of the Universe is based primarily on the speed of light (namely certain galaxies being so far away that the light they emit has yet to reach us), approximations put it at the hundreds of billions. This is again a vast number. In this sense we're not just talking hundreds of billions of redundant stars, but hundred of billions of billions of redundant stars. To put this kind of redundancy as a percentile would be futile as it would take several pages to type out the value. If one were to apply the same logic of counting every second to count all of the stars in the Universe, even if you were to have begun counting at the believed creation of the Universe, some 13.7 billion years, you still wouldn't have finished it to this day, and would most likely have many more billions of years left to count. It is near to indescribable just how much of our Universe is redundant if you truly believe that the Universe was created for humans alone. This isn't even considering the vast distances between the galaxies which are usually exponentially greater than the size of the galaxies themselves, distances in which nothing but the occasional single atom can be found.

It is hard to truly express just how redundant a lot of Universe is if you believe that the Earth is the only planet of worth, or at the very least the only planet worthy of God's good work. No single figure can hope to express it adequately, and many people will just not even give the idea any thought. But if it is indeed true that the entirety of creation is present solely for one planet, ours, amongst all others, one has to wonder just why God would throw so much into such a relatively small project.