Star Trek had earthlings zipping to planets throughout outer space, regularly encountering other intelligent life—most of which looked suspiciously like human beings wearing prosthetics of various shapes. But outside the world of science fiction, before 1994, no planets outside those in our own solar system had been discovered.

Since then, though, as our telescopes have improved, scientists have discovered hundreds of planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy. Seven hundred and twenty-eight, to be exact, currently fill the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia. And we have really only begun to realize how many really might be out there.

A groundbreaking study published in Nature this month, though, blows previous estimates out past the stratosphere.

An international team of scientists evaluated 100 million stars 3,000 to 25,000 light-years away. They analyzed what is called gravitational microlensing data, which enables them to detect even relatively small (approximately Earth-sized) objects, even those that don’t emit light. After calculating the number of planets within that statistical sample, the scientists extrapolated how many planets this would mean the galaxy holds.

Buckle your seat belt.

“We used to think that the Earth might be unique in our galaxy,” said Daniel Kubas, one of the co-authors of the study, from the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris. “But now it seems that there are literally billionsof planets with masses similar to Earth orbiting stars in the Milky Way” (emphasis added throughout).

Billions. Just in our galaxy!

“This statistical study tells us that planets around stars are the rule, rather than the exception,” said the lead astronomer on the project, Arnaud Cassan, also from the Paris institute. “From now on, we should see our galaxy populated not only with billions of bright stars, but imagine them surrounded by as many hidden extrasolar worlds.”

Think of it! If you look at the sky on a clear night, you will see several hundred stars—maybe even a few thousand. Get out a telescope and you’ll see many, many more. However many stars your eye takes in, imagine most of them being the center of some kind of solar system!

These scientists estimate a mean of at least 1.6 planets for every star in the Milky Way. In a galaxy of 100 billion stars, that means around 160 billion planets!

“One can point at almost any random star and say there are planets orbiting that star,” said another member of the team, the University of Copenhagen’s Uffe Grae Jorgensen.

But 160 billion is the most conservative estimate the scientists came up with. It only includes planets that orbit between roughly the distance of Venus and Saturn. Another study, published last year, shows that there could be a huge number of “rogue” planets that drift through space without orbiting any star. There are probably more of these “rogue” planets than “normal” ones, the study found.

If this is the way our galaxy is, it is reasonable to assume that many, many, many more of the other billions of galaxies out there would have a similar plenitude of planets. If there are 300 sextillion stars in the observable universe, that could mean more than half again as many planets.

Scientists have also found planets orbiting two suns, something they once thought impossible. “Nature must like to form planets because it’s forming them in places that are kind of difficult to do,” said astronomy professor William Welsh of the San Diego State University, who wrote a paper on the subject in Nature. Scientists thought that the unstable gravity of a two-star system would tear a planet apart. Now the Kepler telescope has found three of them, and Welsh believes there could be millions in our galaxy.

Of course, scientists love to use the word “nature” as if it is a spontaneously imaginative and powerfully creative force. Mr. Welsh speaks as though it has a will and preferred activities. That’s because so many of them refuse to believe in God, and yet the natural world they study is filled with evidence of imagination, creativity, power, will, design, purpose and a host of other things that point to God.

“Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made,” Romans 1:20 reads (Revised Standard Version).

The question is, why would God manufacture so much interstellar real estate? Science does not and cannot answer that. But the Bible can!

The late Herbert W. Armstrong wrote extensively about the Bible’s answer to this question. One of his most thorough scriptural explanations is found in The Incredible Human Potential.

One passage he examined is in the book of Hebrews: “Thou [God] hast put all things in subjection under his [man’s] feet. For in that he [God] put all in subjection under him [man], he [God] left nothing that is not put under him” (Hebrews 2:8).

“Is it possible God could mean what He says (‘all things’)? Nothing excluded?” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “In the first chapter, the Moffatt translation of the Bible renders the Greek word translated ‘all things’ as ‘the universe.’

“In other words, for those willing to believe what God says, He says that He has decreed the entire universe—with all its galaxies, its countless suns and planets—everything—will be put under man’s subjection.”

That’s not just Mr. Armstrong saying that. Your Bible says God has put mankind over the universe!

Mr. Armstrong continued: “But wait a moment! Before you disbelieve, read the next words in the same eighth verse: ‘But now we see not yet all things [the endless universe] put under him [man].’” This is talking about a time yet future when man will be given such jurisdiction.

After examining several other relevant passages, Mr. Armstrong concluded, “These scriptures indicate we shall impart life to billions and billions of dead planets, as life has been imparted to this Earth.”

The full biblical revelation on this truth is awesome to study—and becomes all the more so as science continues to pull the curtain back on the magnitude and majesty of the great beyond that lies waiting for us. God simply wouldn’t have made the universe so great, so expansive, if He didn’t have astronomical plans for it. The implications are tremendous.

Of course, not all of those sextillions of planets would be habitable. The specific conditions required for life to exist must be exceedingly fine-tuned—to a spectacular, even miraculous degree. That’s why some scientists have called Earth a “Goldilocks planet”: In every conceivable respect, conditions on this extraordinary jewel of a home are “just right.”

Deviations in those conditions, however minute, would surely render the overwhelming majority of planets inhospitable. However, just knowing that God put all that out there with purpose, doesn’t the very existence of all that extraterrestrial territory fire the imagination? The fact that scientists are suddenly looking at stars, as a rule, as being “surrounded by hidden extrasolar worlds” is breathtaking.

It’s as if each star is burning on, awaiting the day it will serve as a hearth for a home.

Surely very few if any of those planets could host life at present. But when the time is right, with some tweaks and housekeeping overseen by the omnipotent Creator of those planets, who’s to say a great many more couldn’t?