© 2009 Jean Royer
© 2009 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
The Urantia Book is full of numerical indications that can lead the researcher to believe that he will be able to calculate all sorts of things, but in fact these indications are frequently followed by others that are so imprecise that they only allow access to an order of magnitude and not to precise calculations. Let’s take a few examples:
A Divine Counselor from Uversa tells us (UB 19:7.4): “It took me 109 days of your time to come from Uversa to Urantia.” We would like to know the speed of this Divine Counselor. We must therefore know the distance separating Uversa from Urantia. Now we know that: from Jerusem, the capital of Satania, it takes more than two hundred thousand light-years to reach the physical center of the superuniverse of Orvonton, far, far away in the dense diameter of the Milky Way. (UB 32:2.11) This more is very vague! On the other hand, we know that: Urantia is relatively isolated on the periphery of Satania. With one exception, your solar system is the furthest from Jerusem. (UB 41:10.5) But we do not know what the radius of Satania is. We still have an upper limit since from the most distant system of inhabited worlds to the center of the superuniverse, there is just a little less than two hundred and fifty thousand light years. (UB 32:2.11) Although we do not know if it is referring to our part of the universe or to the whole of Orvonton. All that remains for us is to take an average and say that Urantia is two hundred and twenty-five thousand light years from Uversa. Nothing precise but an order of magnitude.
We can now calculate the speed of the Divine Advisor:
He travels 225,000 light years in 109 days, or 225,000 x 365 = 82,125,000 days in 109 days or 753,440 light days per day. Our Divine Advisor therefore goes approximately 753,440 times faster than light. We could also say that he travels 753,440 x 300,000 = 226,032,000,000 kilometers per second. Which doesn’t really help us, but could serve as a comparison with the Solitary Messenger.
Now let’s suppose that a Seraph of Urantia is summoned to Uversa. How long will it take him to get there? We know that a seraph cannot go more than three times the speed of light, in other words he will take 753,440:3 = 251,147 times longer than the Divine Counselor, or 109 days x 251,147 = 27,375,023 days or 75,000 years.
To complicate these simple things a little, the Urantia Book offers us other figures, for example those relating to the speed of a Solitaire Messenger, but here not in time taken by the Solitaire Messenger to go from one place to another, but those of the number of kilometers traveled per second. It is again a Divine Counselor who tells us that his companion messenger moved at a rate of 1,354,169,220,000 kilometers per second of our time. (UB 23:3.3)
We know that the speed of light is approximately 300,000 kilometers per second, so our Lone Messenger is going 1,354,169,220,000:300,000 = 4,513,897 times faster than light.
Let us imagine that he left Uversa at the same time as the Divine Counselor to go to Urantia and ask ourselves the question: How long did it take him to arrive on Urantia?
The Lone Messenger goes 4,513,897:753,440 = 6 times faster than the Divine Advisor, so instead of 109 days it took: 109:6 = approximately 18.17 days, because you have to take into account the braking on arrival. We have some apparently precise figures, but they are illusory.
The moral of the story is that it’s going to take us a long time to get to Uversa first, and even longer for what we’re told is the long journey from the shores of Havona to Paradise. I hope I’m not too susceptible to “space sickness.”
NB: I would like to see other calculations made by readers
John Royer