ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Available for over a year

The statistics alone are stunning - a three billion mile journey, taking nine and a half years, at speeds of over 36,000 miles an hour. The New Horizons spacecraft shot past Pluto in just three minutes, but the pictures it’s already sent back appear to have revolutionised understanding of this dwarf planet. I confess that my enthusiasm for all things intergalactic peaked some time in the 1950s with the exploits of Captain Jet Morgan and his crew on Journey Into Space. It enjoyed a brief revival with ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ , and again when the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ started filming Doctor Who in Cardiff, and it was fun to spot streets and buildings I knew. But space never really grabbed me as newsprint did, or theology, or rugby…maybe because science was something of a mystery to me in school, but at least in part because I always felt there were more pressing matters to be spending vast sums of money on, like feeding a hungry world or fighting curable diseases. I accept that there have been useful domestic spin-offs, but I think I’d want to go on arguing about priorities. I acknowledge, however, that I could have missed an important dimension. As Professor Stephen Hawking expressed it as he congratulated the Pluto team: ‘We explore because we are human beings, and we want to know.’ Even those of us with no burning desire to know the secrets of the solar system actually need to know some of what enterprises like this underline. How can we fail to be amazed at the sheer scale of the universe being unveiled for us, sense again how little we understand, how much more there must be? The writer of one biblical psalm gazed at the stars and marvelled that the God who had created them was also concerned about human beings, made ‘a little lower than the heavenly beings, crowned…with glory and honour.’ Crowned, too, with the imagination of enquiring minds. Nearly 400 years ago, John Robinson, pastor to the Pilgrim Fathers, waved off part of his flock as they set sail for America to escape persecution for the faith they held with great conviction. ‘He charged us, before God and His blessed angels,’ said an eye witness, ‘ to follow him no further than he followed Christ; and if God should reveal anything to us by any other instrument of His, to be as ready to receive it as ever we were to receive any truth of his ministry. For he was very confident that the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of His holy word.’ Whether it’s about the universe beyond Pluto, or about the one behind it all, there’s always more truth and light waiting to be discovered.