A light-year is the distance that light, which speeds along at 300,000 kilometers per second, travels in one year. It takes the light from our sun less than 5 minutes to reach us here on earth. By human standards, one cubic light-year is an enormous chunk of space. But in the scale of the universe it is merely our backyard - just one infinitesimally tiny pocket of the cosmos. The total volume of our universe is a million trillion trillion cubic light-years.

Suppose one of those million trillion trillion cubic light-years were selected totally at random as a place to visit, what would it look like? Would it be filled with stars and planets teaming with life? Would we see some of the billions of galaxies that populate the cosmos as stars in our sky? Actually, no. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, choosing such a random destination we would emerge in a pristine vacuum embedded in total blackness. Absolutely nothing would be visible to the naked eye. Galaxies like our milky way (80,000 light years across) would be so faint as to require a small telescope to see them as a smudge.

The gift of life is imbedded in the fact that we did not emerge in such a void but find ourselves on a blue jewel floating in space around a warming sun, covered with water, life surrounding us, everywhere we look. This gift is too precious to take for granted, too precious to trample, too precious to destroy maliciously or through neglect and ignorance. It is out of respect for this gift, GOD's gift of life, that I maintain these pages and send out periodic newsletters.