Our Amazing Spaceship Earth

GOD is the One who rendered the earth habitable for you, and the sky a formidable structure,
and He designed you, and designed you well (40:64) 

Scientists have spent multiple years and billions of dollars searching for life elsewhere in the universe, only to find that earth alone not only teems with life, but seems to be expressly designed for life. An amazing intelligence seems to be behind it all. What is that intelligence telling us?
Have you ever dreamed of traveling through space? The prospects sound exciting to most people.
Amazingly, we are already traveling through space—but without being aware of it! Planet earth can correctly be compared to a giant spacecraft carrying on board more than 6 billion people and billions more animals and plants.

American scientist Buckminster Fuller coined the fitting term “Spaceship Earth” to describe our planet.

We are truly hurtling through space on this giant spacecraft called earth—at the incredible speed of 65,000 miles per hour! This is far faster than man’s speediest aircraft. At the same time, this space vehicle is spinning at more than 1,000 miles per hour. Every year we complete an entire circuit around the sun—a journey of more than half a billion miles!

Yet perhaps the most amazing aspect of our voyage is we don’t feel the trip at all. Certainly as we travel in a car at 50 miles per hour, we can sense the velocity and see the scenery go by. But the paradox is, once we get out of the car and sit down, everything on the ground seems at rest—yet we are still traveling at an incredible speed through space.

[27:88]  When you look at the mountains, you think that they are standing still. But they are moving, like the clouds. Such is the manufacture of GOD, who perfected everything. He is fully Cognizant of everything you do.

If we finish our life’s journey with an average life span, we will have traveled around the sun some 76 times, and completed a trip of more than 38 billion miles—the equivalent of traveling several times to the planet Pluto and back! All of this without ever feeling the velocity or being aware of the trip itself.

This is just one of the incredible and marvelous features of our remarkable spaceship.

[53:55]  Which of your Lord’s marvels can you deny?

Our privileged planet

In the last 30 years scientific discoveries have undermined the idea, once popular among some scientists and scholars, that we live on an unexceptional planet. This idea was summarized in the view of the late astronomer Carl Sagan (of the famous TV series Cosmos), who spoke of “the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe”.

We have come quite far from the similar notion posed by philosopher Bertrand Russell that humanity is merely, as he put it, “a curious accident in a backwater” (Religion and Science, 1961, p. 222). As scientific discoveries have accumulated, planet earth has turned out to be not a backwater region, but instead a very privileged planet.
Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards recently wrote a book about the latest scientific findings that refute Sagan’s assertion that we live on an insignificant planet. They aptly titled the book The Privileged Planet.

Instead of a universe once thought to be possibly teeming with life, more and more scientists are now realizing the rare qualities of our terrestrial globe. Cosmologists

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