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Table of Contents:
  1. Introduction
  2. Preface
  3. Foreward
  4. Part 1: Introduction
  5. Part 2: The Problem
  6. Profit, Power and Progress
  7. Democracy
  8. Education
  9. Religion
  10. Primitive Beliefs
  11. Part 3: The Solution
  12. Earth
  13. Religion
  14. Sacredness: A New Understanding
  15. Spiritual
  16. Sacred Construct
  17. Critical Mind Shift
  18. Three Simple Rules
  19. Our Competing Sets of Survival Instincts
  20. The Foundational Relationships
  21. Relationship With Self
  22. Opportunity and Responsibility
  23. About the Author

Seven Words that can Change the World

A NaturalNews Special Report by Joseph R. Simonetta


Part 3: The Solution

“No matter how exalted we think ourselves, all that we can know and become has a material basis obedient to the decipherable laws of physics and chemistry. And no matter how intellectually far above the remainder of life we lift ourselves, and however technically proficient we become, we will stay a biological species, biological in origin, and thence adapted in mind and body to the living world that cradled us.”

—Edward O. Wilson, 1998 Phi Beta Kappa Oration, Harvard University

Cosmology


A favorite quote of mine comes from a person named Rahel: “If you wish to astonish the whole world, tell the simple truth.” His statement, however, begs the question(s). What is the simple truth? The simple truth about what? In my context, it is the simple truth about life. What makes life healthy? What sustains life? What in life is “sacred”? Sacred is a very unusual word. What could a word like this mean?

There is a phenomenon that I refer to as the way of life (natural law). If we honor the way of life, we prosper. If we violate it, we suffer needlessly. To explore, discover, and understand the way of life requires context, perspective, and time frames. For these, we will turn to three areas. First, we will review some of what we know about cosmology (the origin and structure of the universe). Second, we will turn to evolutionary biology. How long has this planet and life been here? How long have we been here? What has life been through to get this far? Third, we will look at the world of religion. Where have all these religions come from and why?

The Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard observed that “Searching for truth is like searching in a pitch dark room for a black cat that isn’t there.” Truth is elusive. But truth and elements of truth are discoverable. Truth is stubborn. Truth is tough. It’s patient. These things we call facts are stubborn things. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed that “Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; you may kick it around all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.”

From cosmology, we know that every hour we travel in excess of an incredible 1,665,000 miles. How do we do that? It is as though we are on a spacecraft within a spacecraft within a spacecraft (at least). The first spacecraft on which we are passengers is our planet as it orbits the star we call our sun at a speed of 65,000 miles an hour. Our solar system is the second spacecraft. We are passengers on it as it orbits our galaxy, the Milky Way, at 600,000 miles per hour. The Milky Way, the third spacecraft on which we are traveling, is speeding along among other galaxies in excess of 1,000,000 miles per hour. This gives us a total in excess of 1,665,000 miles traveled every hour of our lives. For all we know, we may be on a fourth spacecraft, our universe, as it travels among other universes in a “multiverse”.

Our planet, Earth, is small, only 7,926 miles in diameter and 24,000 miles in circumference. In volume, it is only 3 millionths the size of our sun. We exist in a solar system comprised of the sun, nine planets, 84 moons (Earth: 1, Mars: 2, Jupiter: 17, Saturn: 31, Uranus: 21, Neptune: 11, and Pluto: 1) with more being discovered all of the time, more than 30,000 asteroids, and countless comets, meteoroids, and newly discovered planetoids (beyond Pluto). Of the nine planets, four are known as the inner (and terrestrial) planets: Mercury (3,029 miles diameter), Venus (7,519 miles diameter), Earth, and Mars (4,223 miles diameter). The five outer planets, which represent 99 percent of the mass of all the planets, are Jupiter (89,000 miles diameter), Saturn (75,000 miles diameter), Uranus (32,000 miles diameter), Neptune (31,000 miles diameter), and tiny Pluto (1,423 miles diameter), which is smaller than our moon (Pluto was recently downgraded from ‘planet’ status). The sun, in comparison, is so large (865,000 miles diameter) that it comprises 99.85% of the total mass of our solar system.

As our planet orbits the sun at 65,000 mph, simultaneously it turns, rotating on its axis, at 1,000 miles an hour. To rotate fully once, it takes what we call a day. As we orbit our sun, our moon, 238,857 miles away, orbits us every 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes. Earth is about 93,000,000 miles from the sun. The closest planet to the Sun, Mercury, is about 36,000,000 miles from it. To give you a sense of the size of our solar system, Pluto, the most distant planet, is 3,666,000,000 miles from the sun. The circuit that we orbit around the sun is 600 million miles. To orbit once, it takes what we call a year.

While all this is going on, our solar system orbits the Milky Way galaxy. Envision this: the Sun (comprised only of exploding gases: 75% hydrogen, 24% helium, and 1% other gases) and its nine planets (four made of gas, five solid), moons, asteroids, meteoroids, and comets all orbit together at 600,000 miles per hour like a huge self-contained space station more than seven billion miles in diameter.

How long does it take for us to orbit the Milky Way galaxy one time? Recall that it takes Earth a year to get around the sun at 65,000 miles an hour. In contrast, our solar system is traveling around the galaxy at 600,000 miles per hour. But even at that speed it takes 225 million years to orbit the Milky Way galaxy one time.

The Milky Way galaxy is huge. It contains about 300 billion stars. The nearest to us of the 300 billion is a star by the name of Proxima Centauri. It is one of a three-star system that also includes Alpha and Beta Centauri, which tumble over each other while Proxima Centauri orbits them. To reach Proxima Centauri from our solar system, traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second (at that speed, we could fly around Earth seven times in one second!), requires four years and three months. To make that same trip at today’s space-shuttle speed would take 155,000 years! That’s to reach the nearest star of approximately 300 billion in our galaxy.

Just how big is this galaxy? The Milky Way is 100,000 light-years wide. A light-year is the distance covered in a year traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second: 5,880 billion miles. Multiply that times 100,000 and you have the distance across our galaxy. There is another way, perhaps a little more comprehensible, to visualize something 100,000 light-years wide. If we started at one end of our galaxy and traveled across it at 186,000 miles a second (the speed of light) for every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every year for 100,000 years, we would reach the other end. It’s large. The word “incomprehensible” comes to mind. As recently as the 1920s, we thought the Milky Way galaxy was the entire universe. This was an error equivalent to thinking the earth was flat.

As large as our galaxy is, we now know it is only one of 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Why do we say the “observable universe?” We exist on one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. The gas, dust, and other stars (approximately 300 billion) in our galaxy block our vision, preventing us from observing the rest of the universe. Even though we can actually observe 100 billion galaxies, we estimate that there exists a trillion galaxies in the known universe. Scientists are now pondering the probability that there are many more universes. The nearest large galaxy to us is Andromeda, which contains about 400 billion stars. To reach Andromeda from the Milky Way, we would have to travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, for 2,200,000 years.

Galaxies are organized into clusters and super clusters. The Milky Way, Andromeda, and more than thirty other galaxies exist in a cluster by the name of the Local Group. The Local Group is 10 million light-years wide and sits on the edge of a super cluster by the name of Virgo. Virgo is hundreds of millions of light-years wide. To cross it requires hundreds of millions of years of travel at 186,000 miles per second. It contains thousands of galaxies. However, in cosmic terms, thousands of galaxies is not a big deal. Remember, there are an estimated trillion galaxies in the known universe. This super cluster, Virgo, with all its galaxies, is being drawn at a speed in excess of a million miles an hour toward some unfathomable mass that some cosmologists refer to as The Great Attractor.

Let’s review all of this briefly. In general terms, our universe consists of clusters and super clusters of galaxies. These galaxies contain billions of stars like our sun. Planets orbit some of these stars. Moons orbit some of these planets. We exist on a planet orbited by a moon. Our planet and its moon orbits a star, the sun, at 65,000 miles per hour. The sun, along with the rest of our solar system, orbits the Milky Way galaxy at 600,000 miles per hour. The Milky Way galaxy, with all its stars, planets, and moons, travels among other galaxies at speeds in excess of a million miles an hour. This is the incredible system in which we exist and of which our tiny planet is an infinitesimally small part, a mere speck on the blueprint of existence.




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