The heavens declare the glory of God;
The skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Overview

As long as I can remember, I have had a profound interest in the universe. Even in my earliest years in school, the "let's pretend" games I liked best involved spaceships and flying around among the stars and planets. Of course, in my younger years I generally gave no thought to the Lord of the Cosmos; what little concept of spirituality I brought away from Sundays at the Episcopal Church never seemed to have any bearing on the vacuum of space or alien worlds. Most likely it was my own plain lack of interest. I'd have probably thought the same if my interests had lain in underwater basket weaving.

This page is my answer to that urge within me to understand the cosmos. Here I will explain why, in spite of my fascination with stars and planets, I did not end up a professional astronomer. I will also talk about some of the heavenly bodies that the Lord has seen fit to grace us with. I don't pretend to understand how they fit into the Greater Scheme of Things. Maybe someday we will all learn when God sets up His kingdom. But for now, I am simply satisfied that they are there. For the heavens truly do declare the glory of God.

Professional Astronomy

So if I am so interested in the universe, why am I not a professional astronomer, you may be asking. The fact is that I actually spent nine and a half years heading that direction. Four years studying Physics at Purdue University, followed by five and a half years studying Astronomy at the University of Arizona. So what happened?

First of all, the sky isn't my only interest. I am also simply interested in how the universe functions on all levels, which was why I chose to study Physics in the first place. For the first three years at Purdue, I was planning on becoming a nuclear physicist, to study protons and quarks and other extremely tiny phenomena. Yet I always still had this interest in the sky. One day early in my final year it occurred to me that if I enjoyed the cosmos so much, why not be an astrophysicist? I never looked back.

A number of different grad schools wooed me during my senior year. But for some reason I felt like I should focus on Arizona. Most students applying to grad school apply to 3-4 different places—sort of like a "shotgun approach"—and take the best option of those that accept them. I didn't. Even though the percentage of applicants actually accepted by U of A Astronomy was abysmally low, I didn't apply anywhere else. And I was accepted.

High school did not really prepare me for college. Nor for life, for that matter. Looking back, there were a lot of attitudes and things that I could have done without that would have made my grad school years a lot more successful. Nevertheless, I hung in. Eventually, I took my preliminary oral exam and passed, actually doing reasonably well, even though at the time I didn't feel too good about it. But I wanted to be an astronomer!

Then came the summer of '83.

In late July, my dad called me in Arizona to tell me that he had just gotten back from a trip to Eagle River, Wisconsin, where I grew up, and had found out that a close childhood friend had killed himself the previous fall. That was one of the worst moments of my life. Don't ever let anyone tell you that all deaths are created equally; there is something in the fact of someone blowing their own brains out that is far worse than any other kind of death.

And that was the last time I ever talked to my dad. Only a few weeks later he died following emergency surgery for an aneurysm.

That fall passed largely in a daze. The cold, hard truth was that I had lost my drive for just about anything, including being an astronomer. And the final nail in the coffin was the reaction of the people in the U of A Astronomy Department when I returned from my dad's funeral. It basically amounted to, "So what? Get back to work!"

In fact, it so happened that a well known astronomer and former director of Steward Observatory had died the same day as my dad. Maybe that was what prompted the "so what" response. But it was still personal, and something inside me snapped.

I finished my graduate degree. I finished it because I finish what I start. I finished it because I did still have an interest in the cosmos. But I had lost interest in being a professional stargazer. My colleagues at the time can probably recall that my enthusiasm during my final years had definitely diminished. In the end I passed my dissertation oral defense, but it wasn't a stellar performance. A very real part of me just wanted to get out.

And I had begun to ask myself some very real questions about what I was doing with my life, largely prompted by my friend's suicide. It was these questions that led me to eventually abandon the whole idea of devoting my life to science in favor of doing something to spread the Kingdom of God (see About Billiard's Work).

The upshot of it all was that after I obtained my Ph.D., I basically abandoned the life of a professional astronomer. Today, I work helping translate the Bible for the indigenous people of Brazil. But this does not mean that I have abandoned my enjoyment of the cosmos. On the contrary, the universe still fascinates me. I still keep track of what is happening in space exploration. And I enjoy science fiction, as you can read about on the page about Roy W. Penn Science Fiction.

But the most important thing is to keep things in perspective, to worship the Creator rather than the creation.

The Solar System

Even when I was a snot-nosed kid in kindergarten, I knew the names of the planets. Back then there were nine—nobody had yet come to realize that Pluto was merely one member of a belt of such objects orbiting out beyond Neptune. I even knew the names of many of the moons orbiting those planets, although many that we now know of were still unknown at the time.

Much has taken place since then. We have sent probes past every world in the solar system, and orbiters to four of them (soon to be five when MESSENGER settles in around Mercury). We know things we never dreamed about when I was young. And we are still learning more. Admittedly, quite a bit of the exploration is motivated by the search for extraterrestrial life, something I highly doubt we will find in our own local family (see the next section). Nevertheless, much science continues to be performed.

With the demotion of Pluto, the solar system has taken on an interesting symmetry. Here is a list of the planets and other objects, with links to individual pages that I have created for each one of them.

The Sun

Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars

Asteroids

Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune

Trans-Neptunian Objects

Here you can note the symmetry. First comes the sun, at the center of things. Then come the four small, terrestrial worlds; balls of rock like our own Earth. Then comes the asteroid belt. Beyond the asteroid belt come another four worlds, these being the gas giants; huge balls of hydrogen and other trace elements that have little in common with our home world. Finally, another belt of small objects trails off into the depths of interstellar space.

Life on other Planets

In my early years my imagination populated the heavens with myriads of alien races. Shows such as Buck Rogers and Star Trek served to fuel my visions; later, when I learned to read, I avidly devoured even more material and my ideas became more sophisticated. In the schoolyard, the jungle-gym transformed itself into a rocket ship, and the merry-go-round into a flying saucer. With the classmates that would join me, we went to Venus, Mars and beyond, visiting all of the exotic creatures that our overactive young minds envisioned were there.

By the time I was in sixth grade, reality had started to set in. Although I still hadn't grasped what scientists had already discovered about the planets, I somehow sensed that there really wasn't anything alive up there, at least not in our solar system. (That didn't stop me from writing a little tongue-in-cheek paper about "Little Blue Monkeys from Venus" when my sixth grade teacher asked us to write a page about what we believed about extraterrestrial life!)

When I was in high school, I had come to grips with the fact that Venus was really the next best thing to Hell itself, and I finally understood what a "gas giant" was. But I still hadn't completely given up on Mars. It was only when the Viking lander set down on the red planet and beamed back pictures of sand, pebbles and a red sky that I finally shrugged and admitted that it was dead. A part of me had been hoping to see cactus and desert rodents in those first views. Alas, nothing.

Eventually, I went to college, then to grad school. While I was in grad school, Voyager 1 went whizzing past Saturn and Titan. Up until then, the general idea of Titan was of a ball of ice and rock with a thin shroud of methane that barely served to lighten the sky from pitch black. I was quite surprised to learn that this moon of the ringed planet actually has a higher surface air pressure than does Earth, and that, like Earth, it is mostly nitrogen. Hopes soared again,

Finally, in January of 2005, the Huygens probe landed on Titan. I had still wondered if some kind of exotic life form that thrived at temperatures of minus 290 F and metabolized methane the way we breathe oxygen might possibly inhabit the place. But once again, pictures from the surface showed dead, eroded pebbles in a dry methane riverbed. No alien plants or Titanian field mice came trotting up to check out that hunk of metal that had fallen out of their dull orange sky.

So I was left with the incontrovertible fact that, aside from Earth, our solar system is dead. Yes, scientists are still desperately trying to find microbes buried under the Martian surface, or floating in the Venusian clouds, or living at the bottom of the Europan ocean, but since I don't believe that God does things in half-measures, I don't think they'll find anything. Maybe there is life out there, but if there is, it's not in our solar system.

The Stars and Beyond

As huge as our solar system may seem, it is infinitesimally tiny when compared with the rest of the universe. Light takes eight and a half minutes to get from the sun to the Earth. By contrast, it takes more than four hours to get all the way out to Neptune. On the other hand, it takes nearly four and a third years to get to the nearest star beyond our solar system. And it takes a hundred thousand years to travel across our galaxy. And more than two million years to get to the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large spiral galaxy to our own. Altogether, we can see out beyond ten billion light years into the universe. And there is no evidence whatsoever that that is where it ends. Where that is, nobody knows.

I spent as much space as I did on our solar system for the simple reason that it is known. It is our "cosmic back yard", which we have visited and explored comparatively thoroughly. At this point, the distances to the stars are prohibitive; we cannot hope to send a probe even to the nearest one. All we can do is peer through telescopes, examine the light that reaches us, take it apart, count it, see how it is polarized, and so forth. We learn a lot—although I suspect that if and when we ever do reach the stars with our probes, we will be surprised at how much we missed, just like when our probes reached the planets.

There are an estimated two hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. Our Sun is an average one, a mid-sized yellow main sequence star with an expected total lifetime of around nine billion years on the main sequence, after which it will swell up into a red giant, eventually leaving behind nothing but a white dwarf, the cooling ember of its once furiously active core. The large majority of stars are red dwarfs; small, cool stars with a fraction of the Sun's luminosity, but which will live for trillions of years, long after the death of our home star. And there are a smaller number of bright suns which burn their hydrogen furiously, running out in mere millions of years, and if they are large enough, ending their lives in titanic explosions that we call supernovas, which can briefly outshine entire galaxies.

Beyond our galaxy are more and more galaxies. Some are spiral shaped, like our own. Some are elliptical. Still others are basically without shape. And each galaxy is home to billions of stars, each one possibly shining down on worlds of its own.

And there are nebulae; vast masses of gas shining in cold, ethereal light or else blotting out the heavens. And neutron stars; tiny, immensely dense stellar remnants the size of a typical city, but with more mass than our Sun. A teaspoonful of neutron star material would weigh more than ten billion elephants. And black holes; concentrations of matter so dense that even light cannot escape, which warp the very fabric of space and time in their vicinity. Vast jets of matter stream out of some galactic cores for tens of thousands of light years.

Yet amazingly, the same God who is Lord over all of this is interested in each and every one of us tiny human beings on this small, out-of-the-way planet. Think about it.