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Good morning. Damien Chazelle's new movie First Man tells the story of Neil Armstrong's small step onto the surface of the Moon. It combines the 'magnificent desolation' of the heavens with the sheer brutality of the technological task, in the midst of love, joy and grief of human relationships. Tonight, here in Durham, I will host leading astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman as she talks about discoveries from the Hubble Space Telescope on exoplanets, the size of the Universe, and the Big Bang. We advertised this lecture called 'Our curious universe' in a way that made The News Quiz, as we had inadvertently put after the title 'Space is limited'. One of the curious things about the universe is just how big it is. This is not a banal or trivial thought. Armstrong's giant leap of two hundred and forty thousand miles to the Moon is very much a small step. As The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy began, 'Space is big, really big. You just won't believe how vastly mindboggingly big it is. You thought it was a long way down the road to the chemist but that is just peanuts to space'. In fact, if the Sun was represented as the size of a peanut, you get some handle on the scale of the Universe by recognising that another peanut needs to be taken 200 miles away to represent the distance to the nearest star. And that is just one of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of 100 billion galaxies in the Universe. And if some current cosmological theories are correct, one universe in many universes. Such a perspective is awe inspiring to some and deeply disturbing to others because of our apparent insignificance. Pascal was frightened by the 'eternal silence of these infinite spaces'. Long ago the writer of Psalm 8, looking at the heavens asked, 'What are human beings'. Rather than seeing us at the centre of everything, the writer sees human significance in terms of the gift from God of relationship and responsibility to all. For some it is enough to study and to explore this vast universe. As a Christian I want to affirm and be part of this kind of science. Yet space is limited, perhaps not in its physical extent, but in its ability to fully understand human significance. For that I would suggest we find it in the quality of our relationships, with one another and ultimately for me with a Creator God.
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