“” When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him?” Some little conception, inadequate as it must be, of the wonders of the Universal Spirit, the One God, the Mind and Spirit that rules all things, can be best obtained by making an effort, at least, to think of “The Immensity of the Universe.” By this means we may expand our ideals to something like a true conception of the Creator. In doing this, let us begin with the known and build from that to the unknown.
We suggest, therefore, that you draw a circle 4 feet 8 inches in diameter, to represent the circumference of the sun. Then using the same scale, place the planets contiguous to each other on the diameter of the circle in the order of their relative sizes. As correctly as can be measured with a carpenter’s rule, their diameters are as follows: Mercury, three-sixteenths of an inch; Mars, one-fourth of an inch; Venus, seven-sixteenths of an inch; Earth, one-half of an inch; Uranus, two and one-sixteenth inches; Neptune, two and one-fourth inches; Saturn, four and five-eighth inches; and Jupiter, five and one-half inches. You may approximate the size of the sun, when you perceive that all the planets, placed side by side on its radius, extend but little over half the distance from the circumference of the sun to its center. You will observe that Jupiter, the giant of our solar system, contains thirteen hundred times the volume of our earth. We also find Jupiter with a diameter about one-tenth of the sun’s diameter. Further comparison shows the sun with a volume 1,300,000 times that of our earth. Yet we think our earth a very large place, do we not?
Leaving the confines of the solar system, we now enter for our comparisons a vaster field – the stellar domain. From a recent article in the Scientific American, we copy the following: “Epsilon Aurigae is supposed to be a double star, the smaller of the two is about 350,000,000 miles in diameter and the larger one about 850,000,000 miles, or about 400 and 1,000 times the sun’s diameter.”
With the scale used in our comparison of the solar system, let us compare Epsilon with the sun. The sun’s diameter being 4 feet 8 inches, Epsilon’s diameter is 4,600 feet. If we imagine a circle of this size on the ground and lay our little chart upon in, we shall gain but a faint idea of the size of our earth compared with the size of the magnificent sun Epsilon. In order to comprehend relative size more fully, we shall make another comparison: On a large circle representing Epsilon, let a marble one-half an inch in diameter represent the earth. Now, imagine a man on the marble whose size is in the same proportion to the marble as a man is to the earth. Then, on a ball with the same diameter as the circle representing Epsilon, imagine a man whose size is in the same proportion to the ball as a man is to the earth. Or, again, if a man on the planet Epsilon, whose size is in the same proportion to Epsilon as man is to the earth should see our large planet, he would doubtless need a microscope to discover man upon it.
We make one more comparison: If the Garden of Eden had been on the equator of Epsilon, and Adam on being driven out from Eden, had begun a journey on a fast express train around Epsilon – making the schedule time usually made between New York and San Francisco, about 3,000 miles in 4 days – and had traveled until now, 6,000 years, it would be nearly 4,000 years before he would reach his starting point; or, in other words it would take nearly 10,000 years to encircle Epsilon, whereas our globe could be encompassed at the same rate of speed in 33 days.
Again, we quote from the Scientific American: “The head of Taurus is brilliantly lighted by the V-shaped figure called Hyades, whose brightest star of the first magnitude is the celebrated Aldebaran. This star is red and of a deeper hue than Betelgeuse. In actual luminosity it about equals Sirius, but being much farther away appears less brilliant to us. It may be remarked that Rigel [or Beta Orionis], according to Newcomb’s estimate, is immensely greater than Sirius and possibly exceeds the sun in light, ten thousand times. But its distance is too great to be measured with our present means.”
The comparing of these great suns to Earth sinks our earth to the insignificance of a grain of sand. Yet have we reason to believe that these bodies are the largest among the untold millions of worlds floating in space? We can form no conception of the size of these remote stars, and still less can we form a conception of the space which they occupy, because the space must be in proportion to the bodies occupying it, and because the distances are so much greater than anything with which we have to deal on earth.”
Hiram Butler
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 