Wonder

I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction lately. Not for any particular reason… it’s just what I feel like reading at the moment. In the last 6 weeks I’ve read about 8 books from some of the masters; Arthur C Clarke, Philip K Dick and Isaac Asimov.

The thing I keep reminding myself as I read these books is the age in which they were written. These days we live in a time where the moon landings were nearly 40 years ago and television and movies have dulled our wonderment of space travel. But some of the books I’ve been reading were written in the 1950’s, a time when man knew little about what was really ‘out there’ and I’m amazed at how accurate these writers were!

It seems that we’re not surprised by anything technologically new these days… I can almost believe in anything being possible. But I think about the changes that happened in my grandfather’s lifetime (1913 – 2004) and the absolute wonder he must have felt about the pace of change in the world around him. Just think… the first airplane flew a mere 10 years before he was born and yet by the end of his life inter-continental flight is common place, and we’re on the verge of commercial flights into space.

But what I will remain in a state of open mouthed wonder about is the amazing scale and detail of creation. I was looking at a book full of photos from NASA which included some pictures from the Hubble telescope, and I came across a photo of the Orion Nebula, 1500 light years away from earth and visible to the naked eye. Here’s the thing, this one feature is 30 light years across! To be geeky… light travels at 1,079,252,848.8 km/h… which means light will travel around the earth approx 7 times in 1 second… but light would take 30 years to get from one side of the nebula to the other! All I can say is wow! None of the science fiction in the world can match the reality of God’s creation.