The Vast Universe And The Urgency Of Being Human |
When the noise of daily life has reduced and, on a lucky day, we turn our eyes to the sky during a clear night, we come upon a humble fact: the universe, our place in it, and the imperative to be human. We live on one planet, revolving around a normal star in a universe that is so large it is difficult to comprehend using our intellect. Science has taught us that the world does not declare our importance; it is not centered on us. But, to be ironic, it is we who open the eyes of the universe. Allah writes in the Quran, saying, “There are signs in the making of the heavens and earth in favor of those who reason” (3:190). The huge universe is put forward as a sign, an ayah.
For thousands of years, we have treated the Earth as a solid and stony ground on which we stand, but this perception is a fallacy. Our world is continuously moving. It goes around on its axis at an approximate speed of 1,670km/h at the equator, giving it the day and night cycle. At the same time, it spins around the Sun at an even faster pace, as it spins once a year.
Most importantly, the angle of inclination of the Earth is about 23.5 o. The reason seasons exist is not an incidental detail. In its absence, large parts of the earth would be frozen or burnt, and life as we know it would probably never have existed. It is this cosmic geometry that is associated with human beings, biodiversity of species, and even life itself.
There is nothing beneath which the earth is supported. It is suspended in space by gravity, not as a downwards-pulling force, but as a curvature of spacetime itself. As the general theory of relativity proposed by Einstein suggests, large objects cause a distortion of space around them, and everything else trails their path.
The nearest neighbourhood is made up of the eight planets that orbit the Sun, which is already more than four billion years old and a medium-sized star. The Solar System contains natural satellites, minor bodies, comets, and debris that were left by the formation of the planets. Earth sits in a thin window of these objects called the habitable zone, which is the area where temperatures allow the existence of liquid water. Small changes in the distance to the Sun, the composition of the........