Get ready to soar through eternity!

By Joel Hilliker

I took a tour of the universe yesterday. It was breathtaking times jaw-dropping times awesome!

I grew up in Washington State in a place where the night sky was largely hemmed in by towering pines. But I’d still scramble up onto the roof of our house to open up the view just a little bit more. We used to take trips to the coast, where the canopy of stars stretches clear down to the flat, inky horizon. When I was a teenager, I visited the Wisconsin farmlands and laid on my back in a field one crystal-clear night. That was when, for the first time, I saw—no, I felt—the entire three-dimensional dome of the heavens all at once. I was in an incomprehensibly enormous fishbowl of shimmering limitlessness.

As I drank in that tremendous view, I was probably seeing fewer than 5,000 stars.

I’ve read science books and magazines explaining the vastness of the universe. If you shrunk it down so that the 93 million miles between the Earth and the sun was a quarter-inch—and our solar system was small enough to wrap your arms around—the nearest star in space would be 1 mile away! If you were in Los Angeles, cradling the solar system in your arms, the center of our galaxy would be near Morocco. That’s in northern Africa.

Our galaxy alone is so massive that it takes light traveling at 700 million miles an hour 100,000 years to travel from one side of the Milky Way to the other.

I remember when I first saw Hubble Deep Field. In 1995, scientists aimed the Hubble Space Telescope at a nearly empty speck of sky, the size of a dime from 75 feet away. They took 342 long exposures over 10 days, capturing light emissions nearly 4 billion times fainter than your eye can see.

But in that “empty” pinprick of space, astronomers found 2,500 galaxies! They estimated that the light they were seeing from some of these galaxies left its source 14 to 20 billion years ago. As I looked at those Hubble images, I was looking back in time!

After Hubble Deep Field, astronomers adjusted their estimates of the number of galaxies in the universe upward to between 100 billion or even multiple trillions! Keep in mind: Each galaxy has a lot of stars; ours has 200 billion. I stared at Deep Field for long stretches, trying to wrap my mind around what it revealed of our universe, and just how small we are in the middle of it all.

Yesterday, I had an even greater revelatory experience. I downloaded Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope to my laptop (screenshot at right). It’s unbelievable.

The geniuses at Microsoft Research have seamlessly stitched virtually every eye-popping image of space ever produced into a single multi-dimensional map displayed in an elegant interface. You can set your vantage point to your own backyard and see what the night sky would look like all around you at this exact second if it were pitch dark and there were no obstructions—and then zip out and around at will, chasing anything that interests you, moving at millions of times the speed of light.

Even if NASA installed the Hubble telescope on your roof, you couldn’t see even a fraction as much so quickly—and it wouldn’t come with a zoom lens, either. With the WorldWide Telescope on your computer, you can plunge toward a tiny light speck—or even what looks like utter blackness—and rush up to meet a bright blue planet, then zoom on into the deep, passing crystalline stars, cratered moons, and technicolor molecular and radiation clouds as you wheel and bank through wonderful, deep vastness.

The WorldWide Telescope crunches hundreds of trillions of bytes of information from the best observatories all over the world and shows you the relationships between the objects in the night sky: what is near or far, large or small, spectacular or utterly breathtaking, how they’re all related—and how infinitesimally tiny we are. And it’s not only awesome, it’s real: The location of every star, galaxy, planet and object is as accurate as if you were looking through the Hale Telescope in San Diego or the Gemini Telescope in Chile.

Now, I was excited by Google Earth, which enables you to fly around our gem of a planet, swooping in and out like some supersonic hummingbird, drinking in all the sights. But the WorldWide Telescope is Google Earth times infinity.

Are you as fascinated by the starry cosmos as I am? It seems hardwired into us to look up at that beautiful night sky. It makes you ask questions. How did we get here? Where do we, specks on a pea floating in an ocean, fit in to that giant universe? Many scientists believe they have the answer: It’s all just a big, big accident. None of it has any purpose. They will go to vast lengths to put the universe on your laptop, but when it comes to the big questions, their answer is this: There is no answer.

Wrong. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork,” David wrote. If only he could have seen the WorldWide Telescope!

But why did God create such an unfathomable universe? Just for show? Or does He plan to use it?

Not only did God create the universe, He has mastery over it (Job 38:31-33). Not only did He make all the stars, He has a name for every one of them (Psalm 147:4; Isaiah 40:26). God is deeply excited about the universe, and is about to put it to use!

How? “For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the Lord; and there is none else” (Isaiah 45:18). God formed the universe to be inhabited! Not just to be pictures for us to gawk at. He wants to populate it with life.

But with whom?

If you want to know the inspiring purpose for the impressive, infinite universe and its trillions of galaxies, read Herbert W. Armstrong’s book The Incredible Human Potential. The Incredible Human Potential is WorldWide Telescope times infinity! If you don’t have your very own copy, we would be happy to send you a free one to hold, to study, to mark up.

I thank the scientists at Microsoft Research for providing this thrill ride for the imagination. Knowing what God intends to do with it all in the future, this star-lover is looking forward to many hours of awed happiness—exploring infinity, contemplating eternity.

Visit the website, see videos, and download the free Microsoft Worldwide Telescope at www.worldwidetelescope.org. If you don’t have a PC capable of running it, you can download the latest version of Google Earth, which also has a “Sky” view similar (though not, perhaps, as detailed) to that of the Worldwide Telescope. Click here for instructions on viewing the Sky in Google Earth for Mac or PC.