![]() ![]() Many Christians have thought that this modern scientific picture of a universe of such immense size and age must be in tension with the biblical picture of the world, especially as found in Genesis 1. So the universe is really, really big and very, very old. If you’re wondering how the most distant stars can be 47 billion light years away while the universe is only 13.8 billion years old, it’s because the universe is expanding at an exponential rate. And the universe originated in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. The Earth itself (and our solar system) was formed 4.6 billion years ago. Whereas complex single-celled organisms first appeared 1.4 billion years ago, simple single-celled organisms date back to 3.6 billion years. But life has been around for much longer than that. The Australopithecines originated about four million years ago, and first hominin remains may go back some six or seven million years. The remains of the first anatomically modern Homo sapiens are dated to about 200,000 years ago, whereas the first examples of the genus Homo appeared about two million years ago ( Homo habilis). Human beings have been around for a long time. And the universe is not only big it’s old. I think that “mind-bogglingly big” might even be an understatement. ![]() And the farthest stars in any direction are 47 billion light years away, which makes the observable universe 94 billion light years across. But the Milky Way is just one galaxy in a universe that has some twenty billion trillion stars (not that we can really conceive a number that large). Either way, that’s a lot of stars, with lots of space between them. Estimates for the size of the Milky Way range from 100 billion to 400 billion stars (depending on what we take to be the average star density). Then there’s the Milky Way Galaxy, of which our solar system is just a part. But how far out is the furthest planet, Neptune (now that Pluto isn’t formally a planet anymore)? Neptune is a bit less than three thousand million miles from the sun (2,798,700,000 miles, to be more precise). That distance is actually hard to imagine. Many people learned in school that the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” 1 Just how big is space? The Size of the Universe “Space,” says The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “is big.
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