��ѿ��ý

Available for over a year

Good morning. Russian billionaires don’t always generate admiration but Yuri Milner may yet prove an exception. This week it was announced that he was investing at least $100 million in a project to discover whether there’s life on other planets. It was reported in some parts of the media as a search for aliens. But the real question haunting Yuri Milner is “are we alone in this vast universe?” Should that be so, Milner said, it would be a criminal waste of a huge amount of real estate. To me that sounds like a billionaire’s very commercial take on creation. It seems increasingly unlikely that we are alone. The number of other galaxies and the sheer maths suggests another planet like ours is a probability. But what seems to have clinched it is NASA’s Kepler telescope which has found that planets of earth-like character, where water may be plentiful, are likely to be rather more numerous than we once thought. That’s what’s prompted this new project. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the immensity of the universe reflects a God of abundance, even super-abundance. Human beings seem very small on the scale of things. Psalm 8 says “When I look at the heavens…the moon and the stars that you have ordained; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” Our universe seems beyond our capacity to comprehend. Yet somehow it invites us to do so, to discover what appear to be its secrets. God is also beyond our capacity to understand, yet Jews, Christians and other believers seek to know God. That’s the theological quest. We don’t believe in an unknowable God in an unknowable universe. Yuri Milner was born in 1961, a few months after Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth. Milner’s parents deliberately named him after the cosmonaut. At the time I was at primary school with a teacher besotted with astronomy. But our class celebration of Gagarin’s feat was curiously muted. At the age of ten I was introduced to Cold War politics. But what united both the United States and the Soviet Union at the time was a desire to conquer space and to reach the moon and other planets. Now we’re much more conscious just how tiny our solar system is within the universe. Yuri Milner’s initiative is called The Breakthrough Listen project. Instead of conquering space we are using radio telescopes to listen for evidence of other life. It’s a much more humble approach to the vastness of the universe. The author of Psalm 8 would understand. It’s all about being prepared to be amazed. And for me that’s not far from worship.