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Long, long ago in a galaxy far away, the forces of the dark side were finally overcome and hopes of a brilliant future beat afresh in the hearts of men. Did mankind subsequently get from there to here? Technology back then was so much more advanced than ours on earth today, was it not? But no, that was just fiction brilliantly brought to the silver screen by George Lucas and a superb crew of technicians, providing background for a stellar cast in the Star Wars series.
Man’s imagination is a wonderful thing—it can transport him to the far reaches of the universe or compel him to at least make some preparations for life beyond the confines of planet earth. Man has already walked on the moon and now plans that a few people might soon live for a month or so on Mars. But can we realistically hope to travel to other galaxies?
Our own Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light-years across and about 1,000 light-years thick. It contains at least 200 billion stars (perhaps twice that many), but we really aren’t quite sure. Ours is only one of 50 galaxies in this little corner of the universe, each pinwheel disc rotating at 600 kilometers a second (360 miles per second), which is the preferred estimate, and it means that the earth is traveling around the galaxy at something over 50 million kilometers a day, or 19 billion kilometers a year.
All of these numbers put a transit of the Milky Way ridiculously far beyond the reach of mankind. We are never likely to visit even our closest neighbor in this local group of galaxies, at least not as we are today. Something must first be changed—must, indeed, be drastically changed.
If the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across, it would take 2,500 generations of mankind to cross it at the speed of light (assuming 40 years per generation); and that sort of Star Trek becomes practically useless.
Now science fiction can take us into the universe at “warp speed” by means of some faster-than-light propulsion that ignores the laws of physics. Imagination is a wonderful thing, but the idea of warp speed seems to be a physical impossibility for any space vehicle and its crew, unless we can reduce them all to a beam of photons to be reassembled, complete with life and intelligence, at the proposed destination. Don’t hold your breath, as they say.
And yet, as one of my of my old college masters used to observe laconically, “God doesn’t poke around at the speed of light.” If there be a God, how else would He traverse this far-flung universe wherein there are galaxies without number, indiscernible to human eyes, but spotted by our best telescopes only as milky droplets in the vast stygian darkness of space? Would God take uncountable eons of time to get from place to place in the universe? To think so makes little sense, but we don’t know what time is anyway. All mankind’s history is contained in a brief span encompassing less than 10 millennia. What went before the story of man began is of little consequence, but what lies ahead is of paramount importance. We cannot be forever contained within these mortal frames, but must be released if ever the glories of the heavens are to be explored.
We measure time on earth in years, months and days, and project it onto the cosmos at 186,000 miles per second, but that relates to energy and light as we see it, and we cannot see beyond our limited physical framework.
What is the speed of thought? Is that God’s speed? Does thought have substance—“I think, therefore I am,” as René Descartes observed? That reaches into the realms of philosophy, but what is the reality?
One thing is absolutely certain—that God is! The wonderful all-inclusive name of God is I AM, and it encompasses all that there is in time and space. If indeed, we are to become as He is (1 John 3:2), we must study the Bible and then we will understand. We must become faster to ever understand God’s neighborhood. Then we may travel beyond the Milky Way, and intergalactic journeys will probably not occupy light-years of our time.
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