On the coffee table in my living room I keep copies of the National Geographic magazine lovingly passed on to me by an associate who knows of my fondness for well-turned phrases and provocative subjects.
The December 2009 cover asks the question, “Are We Alone?” The subtitle reads: “SEARCHING THE HEAVENS FOR ANOTHER EARTH.”
The author – Timothy Ferris – is described as a stargazing veteran with a California observatory. Astronomers, he said, have identified 370-plus “exoplanets,” which are worlds orbiting stars other than our own. Eleven of these have been photographed; the rest have been picked up by something called “spectroscopic Doppler technique.”
Writes Ferris:
“No planets quite like our own have yet been found, presumably because they’re inconspicuous. To see a planet as small and dim as ours amid the glare of its star is like trying to see a firefly in a fireworks display; to detect its gravitational influence on the star is like listening for a cricket in a tornado.”
This weekend, I thumbed through the article again. Afterwards, I immediately picked up my copy of the “Urantia” – which I have read twice – and randomly opened it. Here is the last verse on the page I turned to:
“Your planet is a member of an enormous cosmos; you belong to a well-nigh infinite family of worlds, but your sphere is just as precisely administered and just as lovingly fostered as if it were the only inhabited world in all existence.”
I think I hear the theme music from the “Twi-light Zone.”
In case you are unaware, the UBtheNEWS project (see ubthenews.com) documents how new discoveries and scientific advances are increasingly corroborating historic and scientific information in the Urantia Book that was in conflict with scholarship (or totally off the radar) when the Urantia Book was first published back in 1955..
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