I WAS mesmerised by the coverage of the Rosetta mission to land its daughter ship Philae on the rather unromantically-named comet 67P (or Churyumov-Gerasimenko after the two astronomers in Kiev who discovered it in 1969).

Unlike the famous Haley’s comet which travels round the sun every 76 years, 67P’s orbit only takes it six years.

It is only just over a couple of miles across and races through space at about seven miles per second, or 24,000 miles per hour.

Rosetta would never have been able to catch up with it without using the gravitational pull of the Earth and Mars as a sort of bow string with which to accelerate as it covered 500 million miles of space.

Comets like 67P are the leftovers from the formation of our solar system, when the earth was just forming and the sun was a spinning cloud of dust and gas.

They are made up of ice and rock, and it is believed that, by crashing into the earth they brought water to our planet, and may even have brought the larger molecules that are the building blocks of life.

It was for this reason scientists were so keen to drill into the 67P to see what chemical compounds could be found there.

As I write this, the drilling has been carried out, but the batteries have – so far – retained insufficient power to transmit the results.

The secret to life in our solar system may remain stuck on Philae, whizzing round the sun every six years into eternity, all because it landed in the shade.

By the time you read this, we will know the answer, whether we’ve managed to get the information collected, or not.

One of the magnificent features of the New Forest is the absence of street lighting over so many acres, which creates an intensity of darkness in which we can gaze out at the night sky well beyond the mere 500 million miles or so to 67P, beyond the confines of our relatively-young solar system to stars, the light from which, travelling at 671 million miles per hour, has still taken thousands of years to reach us.

As we gaze we are literally looking back into the history of the Universe.

The sheer multitude of the stars and galaxies can’t but make us stop and think about our own significance, or lack of it.

This is nothing new, the ancient Greek philosophers too thought of themselves as mere specks.

Our biblical timetable however, drawing on the genealogy set out in scripture and using the generations listed from Adam through to Christ, led scholars to date the creation at only 6,000 or so years ago.

Every so often there is a letter writing campaign which fills my post-bag with complaints that some schools are still allowed to teach this “Creationism” on the curriculum.

I can’t get excited about it – after all, it didn’t do me any harm, and I am still able to wonder at the magnificence and age of the visible Universe as I gaze up at it.

Some find the very enormity of the Universe a challenge to the faith in which they were brought up, and which they still long to hold on to.

They find it hard to accept the biblical concept that mankind is clearly God’s main effort, when any glance at the night sky informs them that He got round to us so late in the creation timetable and in such a tiny and remote part of his Universe.

The church spotted this threat to orthodoxy hundreds of years ago: the moment that Galileo observed that the sun didn’t go round the earth, but the other way round, they realised the implications of such an astronomic demotion and forced him to recant and withdraw on pain of death.

For my own part, I see things from the other end of the telescope: the longer it took and the further from the centre promotes rather than detracts from the status of our creation; that the carbon and other heavy elements from which our bodies are composed, are the products of many generations of stars, each lasting billions of years working to produce this vital stardust from which we are made up, is surely a measure not of our insignificance, but the very opposite.

Rather it is a measure of our importance to the creator.

As I think of Philae sitting on 67P and the Rosetta mission to send it there, I can’t but help be reminded of the 1970s cult classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the central thesis of which was that the earth was actually a super-computer designed to discover the meaning of life, the Universe, and everything.