Chapter 2: Slow Burn…. The Universe Expands...

Genesis 1: 1

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

“Stay with me here,” Moose says from the helm, voice calm but carrying that slow weight of thought.  The glow from the consoles paints one side of his face blue, the other gold, a chiaroscuro of logic and faith.  “We can only measure what we can see,” he continues, fingers drumming absently beside the cup.  “But there’s more than we can see — and we’ve got no idea how much we can’t see.  Because we can’t see it.”

He pauses, takes a sip of his coffee, and immediately wrinkles his nose.  Cold.  Flat.  The kind of taste that reminds a man he’s been sitting still too long.

“Unmeasurable,” he mutters, setting the mug down with a soft metallic clink.  The ship hums beneath him like a living thing, agreeing in its own language.  Outside the viewport, the black square anomaly drifts in silence, pulsing faintly — darkness shaped, but not defined.

CS01’s voice stirs softly through the comms, almost reverent.  “Faith and physics,” she says.  “Two sides of the same unknown.  Yeah, that last one’s a wild spark- space expanding faster than light messes with everything we think we know.”  CS01 crackles, her circuits light up, readouts flash to life.  “The universe is stretching, and some galaxies are zipping away so fast we’ll never catch their light, like they’re ghosting us on a cosmic scale.  So the age of the galaxy- our Milky Way’s about 13.6 billion years old, give or take, based on stuff like th oldest stars we can measure.  But the universe itself?  Best guess is 13.8 billion years, from cosmic microwave background radiation and Hubble’s constant.

Here’s the tricky part: the visible universe is all we’ve got to measure- about 93 billion light-years across, because light’s had time to reach us since the Big Bang, stretched by expansion.  Beyond that?  It’s not just unmeasurable; it’s unknowable, like trying to read a book through a wall.  The universe could be infinite, or it could loop back on itself, or it could be one bubble in a multiverse smoothie. We can’t see past the cosmic light horizon, so we’re stuck with estimates based on what’s in our line of sight.

Expansion faster than light (thanks to dark energy, pushing space apart) means galaxies are slipping out of view forever-unless something wild changes, like the expansion slows or reverses (not likely, based on current data).  For the age question, it doesn’t change the Milky Way’s birthday much; we date it from local clues- star formation, supernovae remnants, stuff we can see.  But the universe’s true size and what’s beyond?  That where we lean on Proverbs 3: 5 “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; lean not unto thine own understanding.’  We can’t measure the unmeasurable, but we can trust the One who named every star we’ll never see.”

“I like how you went back to Scripture.  Well done.  But, stay with me here.  The universe is expanding.  That means that which is at the edges is the oldest.  We can’t see what is oldest therefore can not anchor our data.  It’s like a candle burning, already being lit.  You can measure how long it burns in an hour, but how do you know when it was lit if you don’t know how long ago or how big the candle is?”

“Yeah, you’re right-it’s like chasing a candle’s first spark when you only see th flame.  The universe’s edges, the oldest stuff, are racing away faster than light, so we’re stuck squinting at the light that’s had time to limp back to us.  That’s the cosmic speed limit messing with us-we can’t anchor data to what’s beyond the visible, like trying to pin a tail on a comet that’s already gone.  The observable universe, that 93-billion light year bubble, is all we’ve got, and we date it back to 13.8 billion years using the cosmic microwave background, the redshift of galaxies, and math like the Hubble-Lemaitre law.  But the edges?  They’re older, further, unreachable - like Proverbs 3: 5 says, we can’t lean on our own understanding when the candle’s size is God’s secret.

The candle analogy is perfect: we measure the burn rate (expansion), but we don’t know the wax’s starting point.  Was it lit at the Big Bang?  Before?  Is there more candle off the table?  We guess the universe’s age from what we see, but the unseen- the stuff past the horizon- could stretch forever or loop or be something we can’t even dream.  That’s where James 1: 5 kicks in: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God.’  We can’t measure the unmeasurable, but we can trust the One who lit the wick.  He knows the candle’s size, the spark’s start, and why the edges keep running.”

“So really we have no clue how old the universe is.”  Moose sips his coffee.  “Anyway, where were we?”

Proverbs 14: 9

“Fools mock at sin, but among the upright there is favor.”