To the editor:

Historically, people thought that the Earth was the center of creation and the sun, moon and stars rotated around our planet. Eventually through the work of Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus and modern astronomers, it was realized that our sun was just another star and the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. Our sun is one of roughly 200 billion stars in our galaxy.

It is now estimated that there is over a trillion galaxies in the universe. Suppose an average galaxy contains around 200 billion stars, that’s a 2 followed by 11 zeros. And further consider a trillion galaxies. The total number of stars would be the product of 2 followed by 11 zeros and a 1 followed by 12 zeros producing 2 followed by 23 zeros. That is a mind boggling number of stars. Astronomers claim that there are more stars in the universe than all the grains of sand on the world’s beaches and deserts combined. To put this in perspective, consider the glass salt shaker in a typical restaurant. If the salt grains represent stars, it would take several billions of salt shakers full of salt to approximate all the stars in the known universe. Spill a little salt on the table and look at one grain. That would represent our sun.

But, naively, in the past and even today, there are people that think the universe exists just for their special group or tribe. The ancient Greeks and Romans had their pantheon of gods that interacted in their lives. The Hindus in Asia have their thousands of gods. The Orthodox Jews believe that they are the chosen people of god. Christians believe the world revolves around an eschatological preacher put to death by the Romans. Muslims believe that Allah delivered his message to Muhammad via an angel.

We know that intelligent life arose on at least one planet: ours. If intelligent life occurred once per galaxy, and probably vastly more times, there would still be at least a trillion intelligent life forms on other planets. This is a serious problem for religious fundamentalists that believe we have disobeyed god and need redemption by killing a human scapegoat. Are trillions more sacrifices needed throughout the universe?

What is the purpose for all the trillions of other galaxies, stars, and planets? There’s no known answer, but at least we can get out of our myopic mind-set.

David M. Keranen

Bakersfield, Calif.