There was a feature on the airplane I recently flew on that I’d never seen. I guess it might have been there before, but I had never really noticed it. The seat in front of mine had a digital display noting our global location as we flew. This is really cool, because you can look out the window and try to pick out landmarks. But the thing I hadn’t noticed in the past was the temperature gauge. It read -63 degrees! This was remarkable to me because cosmologists (not the ladies that will give you a makeover, the real, live Carl Sagan types) tell us that a few degrees either way and our earth would be permanently frozen. Or so hot that the oceans would steam up and cause a permanent greenhouse effect, burning off all the water. And you don’t have to go up very far in the atmosphere to feel as if you are in Antarctica!

Just to confirm how really cold it was, I noticed frost forming on the outside window of the airplane. This frost is pictured above and reminds me of starfish or plankton. Our earth is so delicately balanced, as one of our linked sites, the Privileged Planet shows us. Not only do we have the perfect type of sun (only about 2% of stars have the right mix of size, light, and heat), but we are just the right distance from it. That’s just the start. Our orbit is almost a perfect circle so we don’t veer too close or stray too far. And our moon—much larger than most—keeps the earth from tilting on its axis as we hurl through space. We are in the perfect part of a spiral galaxy, and our orbit is protected from stray comets and debris by the massive gravity of Jupiter and Saturn.

The frost melted before we landed in Dallas, and I walked out of the airport to a balmy 72-degree evening. Thankful to be a part of this remarkably balanced and designed place.