Prophet Muhammad said that the sun and the moon were two signs with which Allah instills a sense of awe in His servants. (Muslim) So Ramadan might be the right time to expand our minds by thinking about Allah’s other worlds.
During Medieval times most Christian theologians accepted the Ptolemaic earth centered Greek view of the universe as an absolute universal truth. Some Christians still think that humans must be at the literal center of God’s creation. Thus they believe that the rarity of life in our universe proves that God must have created life on this planet.
But the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an teach that the Living God created the whole universe to be conducive to the universal evolution of life. The Zabur of David says, “Your kingdom is a kingdom of all worlds; and Your dominion is for all generations.” (Zabur-Psalms 145:13).
And the Qur’an says, “We have not sent you but as a blessing for all the worlds.” (Al-Anbiya 107). Muslim commentators say this refers to the 18.000 worlds created by Allah. Our world is but one of them. (Mir’at-e-Kainat, vol.1, p.77)
Astrophysical studies confirm this Biblical and Qur’anic view. Water is necessary for all life on earth, the only planet that we know of that has life on it. It is possible that there are planets in other solar systems (over 4000 exoplanets confirmed so far) where life has developed without liquid water, but for now ours is the only one we know about, and so if water is very rare on other planets so is life.
But if Lindy Elkins-Tanton Phd a prominent scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.is right, almost every rocky planet develops a liquid water ocean shortly after forming, suggesting that potentially habitable alien worlds may be common throughout the universe.
Analysis of ancient Earth rocks shows that our own planet hosted an ocean of liquid water at least 4.4 billion years ago, just 160 million years or so after our solar system’s birth. This water came primarily from the planetesimals that glommed together to form Earth long ago, rather than from comet impacts, as some researchers had previously believed, she added.
While comet delivered water probably made a contribution later on, “it’s not required,” Elkins-Tanton said, citing studies that model planetary building blocks and how they come together. “You can make a water ocean without it. For example, even if the pieces that built Earth contained just 0.01 percent water by weight, our planet still would have harbored an early global ocean hundreds of meters deep.” she said.
Such primitive oceans form in a multistep process. Water first boils out of the molten rock covering a newborn terrestrial planet heated up by accretionary impacts, creating a steamy atmosphere. This atmosphere then collapses as the planet cools, returning the water to the surface and generating an ocean. “The ramifications of this are that, in any solar system anywhere in our universe, if it’s made of rocky materials with similar water contents to ours, rocky planets should be expected to start with a water ocean.”
Further, models developed by Elkins-Tanton and others “all indicate that this cooling and collapse process happens on the order of 10 million years or less,” she added. That’s an exciting prospect for astro-biologists, as life on Earth is found nearly everywhere liquid water exists.
Thus, more and more evidence is accumulating that nature has been formed to create life: Thank God. “The heavens declare the glory of God. The universe proclaims God’s handiwork.” (Zabur of David-Psalms 19:2)
“There is a sign for them in the lifeless earth [of most exoplanets] [but] We give it [this planet] life, and We produce grain from it [the earth] for them to eat; We have put gardens of date palms and grapes in the earth, and We have made springs of water gush out of it so that they could eat its fruit. It was not their own hands that made all this. How can they not give thanks? (Quran 36:33-36)
