Pints in the Sky

Hi All,

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth...he also made the stars" (Genesis 1)

"Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array " (Genesis 2, 1)

Nothing could be more true of the above verses in Torah, that what we are discovering about our universe; many 'fixed' suppositions about what can and cannot exist in space and what should and should not be there are all being turned on its head, which is why I can never get why atheists claim 'science' as their religion, but then I never really get why, on the other extreme, some so -called Haredi Orthodox dislike science so much either, given that we are studying the work of He Who made heaven and earth (Psalm 134).


But that's a story for another day. Over the years, scientists have discovered planets made of diamonds, planets called 'hot Jupiters' orbiting so close to the sun, they are like massive steel factories and in our own solar system, Titan is a moon of natural gas lakes liquid hydrocarbons and frozen methane, with more barrel of oil equivalents that the whole earth. Neptune, it is believed contains diamonds that are as big as icebergs and float in a liquid ocean of hydrogen.


But nothing could be more cool than the fact that, in what are called molecular clouds, there are billions and billions of pints of alcohol. True most of it is undrinkable, being methanol, Ethylene glycol (uses include anti-freeze),Vinyl alcohol (used in the chemical industries), but there is a fraction which is ethanol ,that is drinking and 'fuel' alcohol. But a fraction in a gas cloud, some of which are 300 billion miles across, still means that there are about 400 billions of drinkable, but probably frozen, booze as a conservative estimate, from one cloud, which overall contains ten billion, billion pints of alcohol (!). I look forward to the day when we go to the stars and touch this for ourselves, which, one day I am confident that we will.