Tiny Earth Light Years Away

The nearest single star to the Solar System has just yielded up a rare and wonderful treasure.

Around a red dwarf known as Barnard's star, which lies just 5.96 light-years away, astronomers have found evidence of an exoplanet.


And not just any exoplanet. This fascinating world, known as Barnard b, is tiny, clocking in with a minimum mass of 37 percent of the mass of Earth. That's a little shy of half a Venus, and about 3.5 Marses.


The reason it's so marvelous is that tiny exoplanets are really, really hard to find. Although Barnard b is not habitable to life as we know it, its discovery is leading us closer to the identification of Earth-sized worlds that may be scattered elsewhere throughout the galaxy.  READ MORE...

Cosmological Distance Measurements

Measurements of the distance to extragalactic sources allow us to infer the major energy constituents of our Universe.

Two decades ago such measurements revealed that most of the energy in the Universe is in `dark energy’ — a discovery that has had immense implications for fundamental physics. 

Currently there is a 10% discrepancy in cosmic distances inferred with the two most accepted techniques, despite 1-2% errors claimed on both methods, with the model that is most successful at reconciling this discrepancy being an earlier era where something like dark energy was again important. 

Interpreting mild tensions can be challenging and ideally a much more precise measurement would be performed. Such a measurement could also lead to entirely new discoveries.  READ MORE...

New Section of Universe Discovered

Astronomers may have detected a dozen large objects lurking beyond the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system, suggesting there could be another equally massive, "second Kuiper Belt" hiding beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Researchers may have detected a dozen new, large objects beyond the Kuiper Belt, which suggests that there is lots more stuff in the solar system than we realized. It could even hint that there is a "second Kuiper Belt" further out toward the edge of our stellar neighborhood, Science.org reported.

The sun's influence reaches much further out into space than the eight planets that orbit around it. Beyond Neptune, the solar system stretches out to around 100 astronomical units (AU), which is 100 times the distance between Earth and the sun. For context, the most distant planet from the sun, Neptune, is roughly 30 AU from our home star.

Beyond the edge of the solar system, or heliopause, lies the Oort Cloud — a reservoir of comets and asteroids that are loosely contained by the sun's gravity — that stretches to at least 1,000 AU from the sun, and likely even further.

But a majority of the largest known asteroids, comets and other large objects that lie beyond Neptune's orbit are contained within the Kuiper Belt, which stretches between 30 and 50 AU from the sun. 

Famous residents of the Kuiper Belt include the dwarf planet Pluto and the double-lobed object Arrokoth — the most distant object visited by a spacecraft. Planet Nine, if it exists, would also lurk somewhere within the Kuiper Belt. 

Until now, very few massive objects in the solar system have been found beyond the Kuiper Belt.  READ MORE...

Earth's Water Came From Space

Earth may have formed much more rapidly than previously believed after born as tiny millimeter-sized pebbles that accumulated over a period of just a few million years.

The new theory also implies that rather than water being delivered to Earth by icy comets, this vital ingredient for life is present on our planet due to our young planet thirstily sucking up water from its space environment. 

The theory could have important implications for the search for life outside the solar system, indicating that watery and habitable planets around other stars may be more common than currently theorized.

The new theory put forward by the team suggests that around 4.5 billion years ago when the sun was an infant star surrounded by a disk of gas and dust, known as a proto-planetary disk, tiny particles of dust would be quickly sucked up by forming planets once they reached a certain size. 

In the case of the infant Earth, this "vacuuming up" of disk material ensured our planet was supplied with water.  READ MORE...

Alien Spacecrafts in our Solar System

This might be a little out there.

Alien-hunting Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is back again, armed with new, not-yet-peer-reviewed research. This time, Loeb ups the ante by claiming it's possible that there's — get this — four quintillion alien spacecraft lurking in our solar system. That'd be, uh, a lot of flying saucers.

The study, spotted by the Daily Beast, is a follow up on the first discovery of an interstellar object to visit our solar system, dubbed 'Oumuamua, back in 2017. By all accounts, 'Oumuamua was a very weird object, the nature of which scientists are still hotly debating. Speculated to be cigar-shaped, it sparked tons of debate on whether it was an extraterrestrial visitor.

Loeb isn't outright saying 'Oumuamua was aliens per se, but he is saying we should be open to that possibility. In light of that outlook, he's basically asking what "respectable" scientists would never deign to: how many possible 'Oumuamuas could there be in our solar system that go unnoticed?  READ MORE...

Super Earths Are Common

Astronomers now routinely discover planets orbiting stars outside of the solar system – they’re called exoplanets. But in summer 2022, teams working on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite found a few particularly interesting planets orbiting in the habitable zones of their parent stars.

One planet is 30% larger than Earth and orbits its star in less than three days. The other is 70% larger than the Earth and might host a deep ocean. These two exoplanets are super-Earths – more massive than the Earth but smaller than ice giants like Uranus and Neptune.

I’m a professor of astronomy who studies galactic cores, distant galaxies, astrobiology and exoplanets. I closely follow the search for planets that might host life.

Earth is still the only place in the universe scientists know to be home to life. It would seem logical to focus the search for life on Earth clones – planets with properties close to Earth’s. But research has shown that the best chance astronomers have of finding life on another planet is likely to be on a super-Earth similar to the ones found recently.  READ MORE...

End of Our Solar System

Evolution of the Sun during its main sequence lifetime. Each curve shows one of the Sun’s characteristics compared with the current Sun. The red curve shows its luminosity (brightness). Credit: Wikipedia.

This is the 11th and final chapter in the Solar System’s story. It is about the long-term future of the Solar System, which will come to an end in about 100 billion years.

Our Solar System is on its way out. Slowly.

Over the next several billion years, a series of unfortunate events will take place, spanning from the not-so-great to the truly tragic. Afterward, our Solar System will be gone: all of the planets will be lost and the Sun will be a solitary white dwarf. (Pause to wipe away tears).

I will guide us through our Solar System’s future, one step at a time. Since Earth is our home base, I’ll include a key event affecting life on Earth. 

Here are the five steps to come:

1. Earth’s oceans will boil off.
2. The rocky planets’ orbits may go unstable, leading to a potential giant collision between planets.
3. The Sun will become a red giant and swallow the rocky planets.
4. A passing star will trigger a dynamical instability among the remaining planets.
5. A passing star will strip away the final planet.

It is a near certainty that each of these events will happen, with the exception of number 2 (which has only a relatively small probability). But it will take about 100 billion years to reach the end.

Let’s get to it.

1. The end of liquid water (and life) on Earth
The Sun is ever-so-slowly heating up. Today, it’s about 30% brighter than right after it formed. As the Sun converts hydrogen to helium in its core, the mean molecular weight increases, thus increasing the core’s temperature and thus the rate of the fusion reaction (called the proton-proton chain). This slowly increases the Sun’s energy output.  READ MORE...

A Change in Jupiter's Orbit

A shift in Jupiter's orbit could make Earth's surface even more hospitable to life than it already is, new research suggests.

University of California-Riverside (UCR) scientists simulated alternative arrangements of our solar system, finding that when Jupiter's orbit was more flattened  —  or 'eccentric'  —  it would cause major changes in our planet's orbit too.

And this change caused by the orbit of Jupiter  —  the solar system's most massive planet by far  —  could impact Earth's ability to support life for the better.  READ MORE...

Obiter Hit By A Coronal Mass Ejection

The sun-observing Solar Orbiter spacecraft makes regular flybys at Venus, taking measurements 

of the planet's magnetic field as a side project. (Image credit: ESA)

The sun-exploring Solar Orbiter spacecraft came face to face with a massive eruption of plasma from the sun, just ahead of a pivotal flyby of Venus.


An enormous coronal mass ejection (CME), a burst of charged particles from the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona, shot out from the sun on Aug. 30 in the direction of Venus. Shortly after that, the bubble of solar material reached Solar Orbiter, which was just preparing for its latest orbital flyby of the second planet of the solar system.

Fortunately, the ESA-NASA observatory is designed to measure the very kind of violent outburst it just encountered and thus could withstand the solar assault with ease.

The spacecraft carries 10 science instruments to observe the sun's surface and collect data on CMEs, the solar wind and the sun’s magnetic field. Some of these instruments were turned off during the close approach to Venus, due to the potential risk from sunlight bouncing off the highly reflective Venusian atmosphere, ESA said in a statement.  READ MORE...

Talking to Voyager Again

NASA’S VOYAGER 1 is on a fraught and unknowable journey into deep space. Some 14.6 billion miles from Earth, it and its sister craft, Voyager 2, are the furthest human-made objects from our planet, having made it beyond the edges of the Solar System and out into the interstellar medium. 

At such distances, anything can go wrong. Add to that the fact that these are old craft: The Voyagers launched in the 1970s. 

So when Voyager 1 started to send home weird, garbled nonsense instead of telemetry data in May of this year, NASA engineers might have been forgiven for calling it a day and pouring one out for perhaps the most successful space mission of all time.


But that’s not how NASA works. Instead, they started working on a remote diagnosis and fix for the record-breaking spacecraft. Now, some four months later, they are triumphant. 

Voyager 1 is back online and communicating perfectly with ground control as if it never happened. In fact, the fix turned out to be relatively simple — or as simple as anything can be with a 22-hour communications lag in each direction and billions of miles of space in between.  READ MORE...

A Rogue Star & Our Solar System

In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published his magnum opus, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which effectively synthesized his theories on motion, velocity, and universal gravitation.

In terms of the latter, Newton offered a means for calculating the force of gravity and predicting the orbits of the planets. Since then, astronomers have discovered that the Solar System is merely one small point of light that orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. On occasion, other stars will pass close to the Solar System, which can cause a dramatic shakeup that can kick objects out of their orbits

These “stellar flybys” are common and play an important role in the long-term evolution of planetary systems. As a result, the long-term stability of the Solar System has been the subject of scientific investigation for centuries. 

According to a new study by a team of Canadian astrophysicists, residents of the Solar System may rest easy. After conducting a series of simulations, they determined that a star will not pass by and perturb our Solar System for another 100 billion years. Beyond that, the possibilities are somewhat frightening!

The research was led by Garett Brown, a graduate student of computational physics from the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences (PES) at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. He was joined by Hanno Rein, an associate professor of astrophysics (and Brown’s mentor) also from the PES at UT Scarborough. 

The paper that describes their findings was recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Journal. As they indicated in their paper, the study of stellar flybys could reveal much about the history and evolution of planetary systems.  READ MORE...

Fusion Rocket Breakthrough

Richard Dinan is the visionary entrepreneur who wants to help humans leave Earth and inhabit other planets in the Milky Way. And he wants to do it fast. His company, Pulsar Fusion, is betting on harnessing the power of nuclear in space to cut the time it takes to get to Mars in half – and unlock the secrets beyond our Solar System.

Speaking exclusively to Science Digest, the former Made In Chelsea star, 35, said: "In the Milky Way there are believed to be billions of habitable planets orbiting G-type stars like ours.

"That doesn't mean that they've got people on them, but it means that they could support life.

"We're living in a world now where maybe the entrepreneurs of the future can own their own planets.  "To do that, they will need very, very fast rockets.

That may sound like a ludicrous thing to say, but we are almost there - Mars has got quite a keen interest.

"I think part of being human is to leave our planet – we've always followed the stars since prehistoric times and now we need to emulate that."

To make this possible, Mr Dinan wants to replicate the fusion process used by stars like our Sun.  Tipped as the "holy grail" energy source, nuclear fusion has been studied for over a century.

Unlike nuclear fission – the powerful reaction that led to the creation of nuclear weapons – fusion takes two light atomic nuclei to combine to form a single heavier one while releasing massive amounts of energy.  READ MORE...

Controlling the Moon

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway and Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty

In 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy declared that his nation would be the first to land a man on the moon. That ambitious goal would later be fulfilled as two NASA astronauts took wobbly steps across the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, much to the dismay of Russia’s own space program leaders.

More than 60 years later, a new space race to the moon has begun, albeit with much higher stakes and brand new players ready to make the 238,855-mile journey. This time, the race to the moon is about much more than just planting a flag on its dusty surface. Getting to the moon first could also mean calling dibs on its limited resources, and controlling a permanent gateway to take humans to Mars—and beyond.

Whether it’s NASA, China, Russia, or a consortium of private companies that end up dominating the moon, laying claim to the lunar surface isn’t really about the moon anyway—it’s about who gets easier access to the rest of the solar system.

Everyone’s Got an Agenda

James Rice, a senior scientist at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, remembers growing up with the Apollo program and getting bitten by the space bug as he watched the 1969 moon landing unfold on television.

“As a kid, I saw that happening and I wanted to be a part of it,” Rice told The Daily Beast. “That’s basically why I’m in this career today.”

As Rice reflected on the current space race, he recognized some key differences. “Things have really changed dramatically in terms of the technology and the players that are out there,” he said. “This is not the moon we thought of during the Apollo days.” Scientists have learned so much more about the moon through more detailed analysis of lunar samples, as well as several missions that have probed exactly what might be sitting on the moon’s surface and remain hidden deep underground.  READ MORE...

Magnetic Ropes Surround Us

The proposed giant tunnel is hundred of light years wide, making it big enough to encompass Earth, our solar system, and even nearby stars. (Image credit: Eduard Muzhevskyi via Getty Images)

Our planet, along with the rest of the solar system and some nearby stars, may be trapped inside a giant magnetic tunnel — and astronomers don't know why.

A tube of vast magnetized tendrils, 1,000 light-years long and invisible to the naked eye, may encircle the solar system, astronomers propose in a new paper. 

Jennifer West, an astronomer at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, made the proposal after an investigation into the North Polar Spur and the Fan Region — two of the brightest radio-emitting gas structures in our galactic neighborhood — revealed that the two structures might be linked even though they are located on different sides of the sky.

"If we were to look up in the sky, we would see this tunnel-like structure in just about every direction we looked — that is, if we had eyes that could see radio light," West said in a statement.

The curving tendrils — which are made of both charged particles and a magnetic field, and resemble long, thin ropes — project outward from the North Polar Spur and the Fan Region. 

Not only could the strange cosmic ropes link the two regions, but they could form something akin to "a curving tunnel" where the tendrils are like "the lines formed by the tunnel lights and road lane marker," the researchers said.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Well...

 Prove It...

I was raised Methodist, attended Episcopal and Baptist for a while but then decided that my faith was more spiritual than institutional and decided I needed to teach myself a thing or two...  so, I read the Bible (cover-to-cover) taking notes and writing down questions... and discovered there was a lot of information that these religious institutions were omitting...  at least not wanting to share with their congregations.

As part of my spiritual journey, I discovered that there were 12 major religions in the world today, so I decided to learn a little bit about each one of them...  I also read the mythologies of countries all over the world, most of which formed the basis for their religious beliefs.

In all these religions and mythologies, I found similarities about:

• Creation
• God/gods
• Heaven/Hell
• Life After Death
• A Great Flood
• Virgin Birth
• Death of Savior
• Teaching Mankind

So... which religion is correct?

Or...  are all of them correct?

Could God have given them a slightly different story based upon their location and circumstances?

As my self-education continued, I became involved with astronomy, cosmology, theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, string theory, and Stephen Hawking's theory of Spontaneous Creation...  all of which underscored the overwhelming magic of our universe and how it it practically impossible for this type of detail to have arisen out of random chaos brought about by expansion from a big bang.

Since, I was not finding anything substantial on which to hang my spiritual beliefs, I got involved with a program entitled ANCIENT ALIENS...  and, the more I watched that show, the more everything about which I was thinking made sense...

There is a God...  and, there were gods...  all of whom were extraterrestrials from another planet in another solar system in another galaxy and quite possibly from another dimention or even a parallel universe...  we are not alone...  and, when they came to visit us, and supply us with knowledge to grow our civilizations we began to think of them as a God or many gods...

Mankind is THEIR CREATION...  we are even perhaps created or genetically modified in their image...  these aliens or extraterrestrials altered our DNA to push us quicker along our evolutionary path...  they gave some of us knowledge in the hopes that it would be shared with others like:  Einstein, Tesla, DaVinci, Von Braun, and Turing among others who had knowledge ahead of their time.

What really strikes me and sometimes causes chills to race inside me is when I think about what Jesus said to Pilot:  "My Kingdom is not of this world."  How profound is this?  Obviously, the world about which he was speaking was EARTH...  so where is his kingdom?  

• Another Planet?  
• Another Solar System?  
• Another Galaxy?  
• Another Dimension?  
• Another Universe?

Why haven't any of our ministers, priests, pastors, or other members of the clergy explained this kingdom of his in terms that made some kind of logical sense other than saving, he was talking about heaven...?

Don't they owe us that much courtesy?

SO...  my faith is based upon my spiritual journey that continues everyday as I search for more clues as to what is really going on...

AND...  one final thought to leave you with...

if we were created on this planet called earth thousands of years ago, why hasn't our eyes adjusted to the sun because many of us still have to wear sunglasses outside when the sun is shining...  and, why hasn't our skin adjusted either because if we are out in the sun too long without protection, we get sunburn...  don't you think evolution would have caused our bodies to adjust to this sun by now?

Earth's Twin

THE EIGHT PLANETS of our Solar System aren’t the only ones we’ve ever had — they’re merely the survivors.

But that doesn’t mean the other planets were destroyed. Earth may have a long-lost sibling somewhere in interstellar space. At least one rocky planet, around the same mass as Mars, may have been booted out of the early Solar System.

These are just some of the findings compiled in a recent review paper in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, taking a look at the mysterious third zone of our Solar System, those points past Neptune and out into interstellar space.

Today, the planets in our Solar System are neatly sorted by size and composition:

• The four rocky inner planets orbit in the space between the Sun and the Asteroid Belt
• The outer Solar System is the realm of giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — which gathered enormous masses of gas and ice around their rocky cores
• Beyond Uranus and Neptune lies the realm of the dwarf planets, like Pluto, Eris, Sedna, and their even smaller neighbors, whether dwarf planet or comet

And that’s a little strange. As if something is missing.

“It seems unlikely that Nature created four giant planet cores, but then nothing else larger than dwarf planets in the outer Solar System,” planetary scientists Brett Gladman of the University of British Columbia and Kathryn Volk of the University of Arizona write in the review.  READ MORE

Searching For Alien Life

Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question? Are there civilizations more advanced than ours, civilizations that have achieved interstellar communication and have established a network of linked societies throughout our galaxy? 

Such questions, bearing on the deepest problems of the nature and destiny of mankind, were long the exclusive province of theology and speculative fiction. Today for the first time in human history they have entered into the realm of experimental science.

From the movements of a number of nearby stars we have now detected unseen companion bodies in orbit around them that are about as massive as large planets. From our knowledge of the processes by which life arose here on the earth we know that similar processes must be fairly common throughout the universe. 

Since intelligence and technology have a high survival value it seems likely that primitive life forms on the planets of other stars, evolving over many billions of years, would occasionally develop intelligence, civilization and a high technology. Moreover, we on the earth now possess all the technology necessary for communicating with other civilizations in the depths of space. Indeed, we may now be standing on a threshold about to take the momentous step a planetary society takes but once: first contact with another civilization..

In our present ignorance of how common extraterrestrial life may actually be, any attempt to estimate the number of technical civilizations in our galaxy is necessarily unreliable. We do, however, have some relevant facts. There is reason to believe that solar systems are formed fairly easily and that they are abundant in the vicinity of the sun.  In our own solar system, for example, there are three miniature "solar systems": the satellite systems of the planets Jupiter (with 13 moons), Saturn (with 10) and Uranus (with five). 

The only technique we have at present for detecting the planetary systems of nearby stars is the study of the gravitational perturbations such planets induce in the motion of their parent star. Imagine a nearby star that over a period of decades moves measurably with respect to the background of more distant stars. Suppose it has a nonluminous companion that circles it in an orbit whose plane does not coincide with our line of sight to the star. 

Both the star and the companion revolve around a common center of mass. The center of mass will trace a straight line against the stellar background and thus the luminous star will trace a sinusoidal path. From the existence of the oscillation we can deduce the existence of the companion. Furthermore, from the period and amplitude of the oscillation we can calculate the period and mass of the companion. The technique is only sensitive enough, however, to detect the perturbations of a massive planet around the nearest stars.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Russian Cosmism

Russian cosmism is a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in Russia at the turn of the 19th century, and again, at the beginning of the 20th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a burst of scientific investigation into interplanetary travel, largely driven by fiction writers such as Jules Verne and Herbert Wells as well as philosophical movements like the Russian cosmism.

Cosmism entailed a broad theory of natural philosophy, combining elements of religion and ethics with a history and philosophy of the origin, evolution, and future existence of the cosmos and humankind. It combined elements from both Eastern and Western philosophic traditions as well as from the Russian Orthodox Church.

Cosmism was one of the influences on Proletkult, and after the October Revolution, the term came to be applied to "...the poetry of such writers as Mikhail Gerasimov and Vladimir Kirillov...: emotional paeans to physical labor, machines, and the collective of industrial workers ... organized around the image of the universal 'Proletarian', who strides forth from the earth to conquer planets and stars."  This form of cosmism, along with the writings of Nikolai Fyodorov, was a strong influence on Andrei Platonov.

Many ideas of the Russian cosmists were later developed by those in the transhumanist movement.  Victor Skumin argues that the Culture of Health will play an important role in the creation of a human spiritual society into the Solar System.

The Culture of Health is the basic science about Spiritual Humanity. It studies the perspectives of harmonious development of "Spiritual man" and "Spiritual ethnos" as a conscious creator of the State of Light into the territory of the Solar System" (by Skumin).

It's All Relative... I Suppose...

 BIRTH...  DEATH...  INFINITY

BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS

THE PURPOSE OF THE ENORMITY OF THE UNIVERSE

Relativity -  The absence of standards of absolute and universal application...  and from the area of physics, the dependence of various physical phenomena on relative motion of the observer and the observed objects, especially regarding the nature and behavior of light, space, time, and gravity...

Well...  there you have it...

Everything in this lifetime is relative...

• Politics
• Wars
• Crime
• Ownership
• Thoughts and Feelings
• Understandings
• Knowledge
• Application

But, in all of this wisdom lies a tiny misconception in that it is not logical at all relative to our planet earth and that is the purpose of the universe...  its size...  and the relative fact that it is expanding and into what we know not but can only speculate since our knowledge is limited and only relative at best.

For EXAMPLE...  there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand here on EARTH...  and while that statement seems very profound indeed, it still does not explain why our UNIVERSE NEEDS TO BE SOOOO  BIG...

Relatively speaking things are out of proportion when it comes to planet earth and the universe or our solar system and the universe or even our Milky Way Galaxy and the universe when it comes to any kind of comparison.

And...  well into the future of the existence of our universe, I suppose there will be space travel as well as time travel and beings can move back and forth at their leisure and for whatever relative reasons and purposes that they might have...  but it still does not explain what this damn universe has to be so big, relatively speaking that is to say or ask.

Hot Tub Revelations

Tonight, I decided to spend some time in my hot tub after it got dark and sitting in the warm 101 degree temperature water and after turning on the jets, looked up at the stars in the sky...  and noticed that there really wasn't many of them that I could see.

The black sky above my head was loaded with millions perhaps billions of stars even though I could only see  less than 00.00000001% of 99.9999999% of them around our planet earth which is located in our solar system...  and, to expand your mental horizons imagine millions/billions of solar systems in our galaxy and millions/billions of galaxies in our quadrant of our universe.

Now, let's imagine our universe is a dinner plate and our quadrant in this universe represents 1 degree of the 360 degrees that completes the full circle of the universe.  Of course, it is also possible that our quadrant is not 1 degree but 1/10 or 1/100 or 1/1,000 or 1/10,000 of 1 degree.

In short, our universe is incredible vast and in each quadrant there are literally billions of billions of billions of solar systems and galaxies...  so, you can just imagine how many stars there are.

AND, as I look at these stars, I begin to wonder:

1. why am I here?
2. what's my purpose here?

BUT, before we answer those two questions, one must come to terms with the creation of the universe...

• was it created by the BIG BANG?
• was it created by CREATION?

Interestingly, NEITHER BELIEF CAN BE PROVED ABSOLUTELY...  one must have elements of faith that support their belief(s).

If God created the universe...  the big question here is WHY?

And, why did God create Jesus to die for our SINS when it was GOD who gave us those sins in the first place?

The BIG BANG direction does not take us any closer to the truth because we still have to answer the questions:

1. how?
2. why?
3. where did the stuff that created the BIG BANG come from?

BUT...  and more importantly...  why am I thinking about this in the Hot Tub when the whole purpose of the hot tub is to RELAX and not think of anything?

One thing is for sure, mankind on earth relative to the size of the universe is literally INSIGNIFICANT to say the least.  Does belief and faith make mankind on earth more SIGNIFICANT, especially when a member of mankind DIES?

My big question is this:  Does each SOLAR SYSTEM have a God and a HEAVEN?