Amazing miracle

You are surrounded by most amazing “miracles”. As you sit here now, reading this article, you, your room and the whole village or city are racing through space at the terrifying speed of 68,400 miles per hour. And yet there are no bumps, no falling off the planet. Even at night when you sleep so soundly, you travel at the same speed—never a fraction of a second slower or faster.

We sometimes think that our planet Earth is the centre of the universe. But it is just a drop in huge ocean of space. Scientific observation has so far not revealed any limits to the universe. It could so far probe only a fraction of it. Yet to travel to the frontiers of that fraction probed even at 186, 300 miles per second (the speed of light) would take 6,000 million years.

The whole unbelievably vast universe, travelling at a fantastic speed, moves with the greatest accuracy, like a giant clock. Even the most accurate clocks used in scientific observation must be aided by fractions of a second. But the universe (the vast clock) is never a fraction of a second slow or fast. What kind of clockmaker has made it?

When you look at the stars on a beautiful starry night, you are looking back into the past for you see them not as they are now, but as they were hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago. The light you see has taken all the time to reach your eye.

The light we receive from most of them began its great journey long before we were born. Even the light from the sun—only 93 million miles away—takes eight minutes to reach the earth. But from the star nearest to us,  Proxima Centauri, it takes four years. Since light, travelling at 186, 300 miles per second, covers 6 million miles in a year, this means that the distance between Earth and Proxima Centauri is about 24 million miles.