Tag / What God Made

by Greg

Race To The Moon

Earthrise photo taken by Apollo 8 Astronauts
Last night I watched an hour-long PBS special (via Netflix) called “Race To The Moon”. It’s certainly another recommended addition to your queue. The story is just incredible. How in the world did we pull that off in the sixties… and we’re not going back till 2013 or so???

The video is about Apollo 8, the mission where 3 astronauts went to the moon, orbited 10 times, and returned safely home. The famous Apollo 11 was just 7 (or 9?) months later, when they went the remaining 69 miles to the lunar surface.

A pretty cool part of the trip to the moon was just before they were going to break orbit and head home, they read Genesis chapter one via live broadcast to … the world, I think! The creation story probably sounded a LOT different from the moon. What a vantage point!

Someday… it would be neat to visit there…. but Jen says I have to wait until she dies. She doesn’t want me going while she’s still here… 🙂

Anyway, regardless of whether I get to visit the moon or not, watching the story of those guys who DID… fascinating.

Add it to the queue today!

by Greg

Killer Asteroid Coming – 2029!!

Killer Asteroid Coming 2029!!!A friend forwarded me a link to an article he was reading this weekend. The article is from NASA, in 2004. It was determined that a rather sizeable asteroid has an orbit that intersects with Earth’s orbit, and there was a 1 in 60 chance (One article I found claimed a 1 in 40 chance!) of a collision in the year 2029!

Thankfully, thanks to further study and extrapolation of data, the odds have gone down, and what we will likely get is a spectacular show as a giant asteroid passes closer to us than many satelites in synchronous orbit above the earth.

We just don’t know where it will go after that. 🙂 Earth’s gravity may change the orbit of the asteroid slightly… and we may be seeing it again!

So… why doesn’t this happen more often? All that stuff spinning in circles out there… why don’t they crash more often? How does everything work together so well?

It’s crazy, I know.

If that asteroid, or one like it did hit the Earth… it would make a big mess. That show I watched (The Monster of The Milky Way, a NOVA episode) showed galaxies colliding… now THERE’s a collision! 🙂 That would probably make a mess too…

So, thanks Heent for the link… for now, we have averted catastrophe… but who knows what the future holds? With all this spinning and circling… we’re bound to hit something eventually, aren’t we?? 🙂

photo credit: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/

by Greg

Interesting Coincidence

Full Solar Eclipse
We found a neat little podcast from NASA called “Ask An Astronomer” that is definitely very cool for the kiddos. (Mom & Dad like it too!) They are little three minute answers to some big questions regarding things in the sky.

Today we watched a couple: one about lunar eclipses, and one about solar eclipses. Both Jen and I caught a pretty humorous line from someone who either didn’t want to – or didn’t feel “free” to – admit that God could have had some part in putting that stuff in the sky.

Speaking on solar eclipses, the astronomer said, “In an interesting coincidence, the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, but it’s also 400 times closer to the Earth than the sun. So they appear to be the same size in our sky.”

An interesting coincidence… 🙂

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again… there are just too many “interesting coincedences” for me to think that what we see around us has created itself over billions of years. I’m no weirdo who thinks I know how everything got here exactly… not by a long shot. I just can’t believe Someone didn’t have a hand in putting it there. It’s too amazing to not have some Originator.

But anyway… thought that was a funny line. Interesting Coincidence. 🙂

by Greg

Circles

Milky Way Galaxy
I watched a few PBS shows throughout the course of the day yesterday. Some of it was just listening, as I was working while listening to the audio on my laptop. You can watch many of the NOVA episodes online. Well, I happened to choose the Monster Of The Milky Way, and then later, The Elegant Universe.

The first show was about the discovery of some massive black holes at the centers of galaxies, including our own. I am fascinated by all things in space, so this was cool to learn about/see. Then I watched the Elegant Universe later at night, while getting some more work done in my office. It was a fascinating (and somewhat confusing!) look at the String Theory. I can’t even pretend to summarize it for you here, but the called it the “Theory of Everything” 🙂 The people they interviewed were pretty sure that if they can prove their theory, it will explain everything about our universe. 🙂

Overall, it was an attempt to understand the forces of gravity, electro-magnetic forces, time, and various “dimensions” of our universe. From super-huge galaxies, to sub-sub atomic particles. It’s theoretical in some ways still, but they were looking at the parts of the tiny parts that make up the parts of an atom i think. 🙂 Sparticles? Sparticus? Something like that. Just amazing stuff.

AND… here’s the weird thing I noticed…

God likes circles. Everything in the universe from the VERY VERY VERY small to the VERY VERY VEEEERY BIG… goes in circles. Electrons circle the nucleus of an atom. Those make up everything, right? So, that’s a lot of circles. Then let’s get bigger. A lot bigger. The earth spins. The moon circles the earth. The earth circles the sun. The sun circles the center of the milky way. The milky way is moving… not sure if it’s spinning… but… how could we tell? And everything else around what I just mentioned is ALSO SPINNING in some kind of CIRCLE.

Why did He make so many circles?

Anyway, it’s very cool that you can watch these programs online in their entirety. I don’t know how real such a theory is, but it’s fascinating to watch, and I love looking at the stuff that God made. It is awe inspiring every single time. From the way-too-tiny to the super big. And we probably don’t even know the half of it!

So click the links above if you’re interested. Perhaps you’ll be awed as well. 🙂

by Greg

Earth

The EarthI’ve been watching Star Trek a lot again (my Sabres are done, so… I have more viewing time.) 🙂 I love the stories… I love the idea of space travel. I even love the idea of alien worlds and cultures. Pretty neat.

I have a nifty screen saver that shows a real-time satelite view of the Earth. It’s amazing! I was just taking a look at it and just had to smile at how COOL the Earth is. I thought how amazing it would be to see it from that vantage point. Perhaps from the moon? Even further? But then how much cooler to return home to the big blue oceans, and the green land masses, and the white clouds circling the globe.

And I just wondered… what if we are the only ones? What if we someday figure out how to travel between star systems… and we discover that there is no other planet like ours, and there are no other forms of life outside of our own planet? (In this case, I mean like us… not microbes or whatever…) What would that say about our planet? About us? Doesn’t that make this place pretty amazingly special?

I think it does.

Like I said… I think it would be neat to find other planets like ours out there… even to find there are other living beings elsewhere in the universe. But so far… it’s just us, and we definitely have the coolest planet out there!

Although, I am somewhat partial to those big blue planets, Neptune and Uranus… they look pretty cool, too… 🙂

by Greg

Simply Fascinating

This morning as I was taking my shower, I turned to face the water to rinse off my soapy face and I felt a breeze. I thought, “That’s odd,” and opened my eyes. It was just the water shooting out, displacing the air, and making a little “breeze”. You don’t necessarily think that when the water shoots out that it has to “move” anything… cause air is so “transparent”. Hard to remember it’s there, and actually substantive. But, it’s true, and there was a little breeze.

So, I just stood there, taking it in for a moment. It was fascinating.

Then I felt a little silly, being fascinated by a shower head… 🙂 But really, it is cool. And so many times we miss the simple things that really are fascinating. God has packed the world full of simply amazing things. Just like the little breeze made by shooting water through the air, or we’ve been having fun tracking Venus across the sky lately, or … you name it. From the tiny to the immense, there are very simple, everyday things that can be so fantastically amazing if we let them.

I hope you have a moment or two today away from the rush and routine of daily life to just be fascinated by something as simple as a little breeze.