Fair point, pete. Voyager 1 still has a way to go before it will pass through the Oort Cloud. I'm afraid I was confusing the Kuiper Belt with the Oort Cloud. This is where comets come from.

But—halos (or Oort Clouds) have been observed around other stars. In fact it is inconceivable that a star could form without leaving a large cloud of matter that didn't get caught up sufficiently in the new-formed star's gravitational pull to the center, but is still sufficiently trapped by gravity to orbit the star.

Why does this in any way contradict anything in the Bible? I don't see your problem.

Observations of the skies with the new orbital telescopes have revealed that the vast majority of the "billions and billions" of stars in the Cosmos are what are known as "main sequence" stars, neither giants nor dwarfs, and that well over 100 of the nearest stars have planets orbiting them. Just statistically, some of those planets will be earth-like, terrestrial worlds, in the "temperate zone" (between the freezing and boiling point of water) to have atmospheres, and, indeed, oceans.

In which Life can evolve!

In the novel, Contact, written by Carl Sagan, then movie starring Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway, director of a SETI project, said when a group of school children asked her if there were life on other planets, "The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space. Right?"

Take a stew of organic chemicals, such as those found in watery areas all over the world and add energy—such as sunlight—and this—amazingly enough but demonstrably true—can produce one-celled living organisms. Life! And at this point, the process of evolution can begin.

It sounds a bit "Frankensteinian," but it is possible to produce living, one-celled organisms in the laboratory, in a beaker full of chemicals that include carbon by in-putting a bit of energy. Sometimes even bumping the beaker is sufficient to get the reactions going. True, nothing has come crawling up out of the beaker and said "Take me to your leader," but Life nevertheless!

This is demonstrable and repeatable.

And it's at this point that evolution, natural selection, and "the survival of the fittest" can begin.

This same process can take place on ANY planet with essentially earthlike characteristics (and perhaps others, but that is, as yet, uncertain). So it's simply illogical—and small-minded—to assume Life is confined to one planet only in this incredibly vast Cosmos.

One of the problems with Creationists is that they make the somewhat (I would think!) blasphemous assumption that the Almighty, All-Powerful God they worship is only capable of coping with one small planet and has to keep tinkering with the doings of His living creations.

If this vast Cosmos in which we live were, indeed, created by an Almighty Omniscient Intelligence, He, She, or It is so far beyond our knowledge—even our ability to comprehend—that claiming to know the Mind of God is the rankest of blasphemies.

Don Firth