by Ned Keller

When you are next in the Museum of Natural History in New York City (the museum caricatured in the movie “Night in the Museum”), take time to visit the Hall of Diversity, where there are preserved over 1,500 examples of the millions of species of living things here on earth. What an awesome display of God’s creative energy!

Besides being the Creator of such an incredible diversity of life, God created immense diversity in the physical universe as well. Although astronomers have devised groupings of stars based on their temperatures and sizes and other characteristics, these estimated twenty thousand billion billion stars are unique. Astronomers have names, some dating from antiquity, for a only few hundred of these stars and catalog (numeric) designations for several million of them, but according to Psalm 147:4, God has names for each of them. Given the world population of nearly 7 billion people, this means that in the known universe there are about three trillion stars per man, woman and child.

As a space physicist, I am privileged to study the diversity of the planets around our closest star, the Sun. The inner “terrestrial planets” are relatively hot and rocky and the outer planets are mostly spheres of gas. Often these differences have fairly simple explanations. For example, the difference in the atmospheres of the terrestrial planets and the outer planets can be explained well by some basic physical principles dealing with how gas molecules move when pulled in by an object’s gravity while simultaneously darting about faster than a speeding bullet. However, other characteristics of these planets are still mysteries – e.g., why Earth and Venus (pretty much “twins” in so many other ways) have such dramatically different magnetic fields. It is good for us that we have a relatively strong magnetic field. Without it, life here would be unlikely. Venus, on the other hand, has no measurable magnetic field, which would make it a sad day for a homing pigeon, or for a Boy or Girl Scout trying to use a compass there.

Over the past 24 years, new methodologies and increasing precision in measuring the light coming from stars other than our Sun have enabled astronomers to infer the presence of over 350 extrasolar planets. In the early days of discovering these extrasolar planets, the media stories seemed to follow a predictable pattern: “New Planet Discovered Orbiting Star X! Maybe There Is Life Out There!” The headline seemed to indicate that life was all but inevitable, but every article ended with some rendition of the sad refrain: “Hile expert Y says that this discovery is interesting, this planet is either too hot, cold, large, small, dry, toxic, etc. for life to ever conceivably exist there.”

Each discovery of a new planet drives home the observation of how unique Earth is. Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards beautifully present our uniqueness in their book, “The Privileged Planet.”

There is another exhibit hall in the Museum of Natural History – the Hall of Human Origins. Only one of the thousands of species in the Hall of Diversity gets its own hall. If there ever were a “Hall of Planetary Diversity,” all current evidence points to the existence of only one planet special enough to be home to beings in God’s image. Just as the study of other animals in biology helps us to see how special humans are, so the study of other solar system bodies helps us to see how special is our home, Earth.