Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, this Universe was created by the Touring Creator. He (and I use the term only for convenience) was bored and wanted a new hobby. He thought that creating a new Universe and letting it develop without interference might be interesting. He set up his Creation so as to produce certain physical laws that would be conductive to life. This resulted in the values we see for all the transcendental numbers (e, Pi, etc.) and the mass ratios and charges of all the subatomic particles. An important result of his decisions is the fact that liquid water is clear. Just imagine how life would have developed if water was the color of ink.

But I digress.

The TC watched as the first stars formed, went through their life cycles and died. New generations of stars lived and died, creating heavier elements. Eventually, life developed on billions of worlds. The TC spends his time Touring his Universe, looking at all the cool stuff his Creation has spawned. All the different astronomical configurations and interactions must be very interesting. The different life forms, their development and their adaptations to their environments must be fascinating.

Some questions come to mind:

Can the TC travel faster than light?

Does it really matter? After all, he has all the time he needs. There’s no hurry.

Or maybe there is. There’s a lot to see and very little of it is out there between galaxies. Let’s assume he can travel instantaneously.

On average, how much time does he spend observing each solar system, each planet, each life form?

This is important only because there are billions of galaxies. The latest observations from the Hubble Space Telescope indicate that there may be over a trillion galaxies. Each of them contains many billions of stars. The total may be well over 50,000,000,000,000,000 stars. We can’t know how common planets are or how many of them have life. Let’s say he spends, on the average, one month observing each solar system. He’s had time to observe about 180 billion solar systems so far, a tiny fraction of 1% of the total.

Has he ever been to Earth?

The Milky Way galaxy is about 13.2 billion years old. Earth is only 4.5 billion years old. Life began about 3.5 billion years ago and didn’t begin to get interesting until about 600 million years ago. Humans (depending on how you define human) have been around for less than a million years and more-or-less modern Humans have existed for maybe 200,000 years. The most recent data suggests that we’ve had language for only 60,000 – 80,000 years at most. Before that, humans weren’t much different from most other animals. The TC might not have found us particularly interesting. Recorded history is maybe 5,000 years. That’s not very long.

So, what are the odds that he’s been here while humans have had the ability to record anything?

The TC is primarily an observer, don’t forget. He may or may not be interested in interacting with the creatures he’s observing.

Contact with non-sentient life forms is a waste of his time. He’s seen that extinction is normal. No point messing with something that’s going to be gone soon anyhow.

Communication with sentient life forms might be interesting, but a being that’s billions of years old and capable of creating a universe probably wouldn’t bother. After all, what could he learn from them?

Of course, we don’t know how many sentient life forms there are in this Universe. We might be the only one. If there are others, he might spend quite a long time checking them out or going back to see how they’re getting along. If sentience is common, our one-month-per-solar-system assumption goes out the window.

And there’s another possibility: He may have gotten all he wanted out of this Universe and gone elsewhere. After 10 or 15 billion years, anything gets old.

Any way you look at it, the odds that he’s been within several million light years of Earth in the last 5,000 years makes winning the Lotto look like a sure thing.

Thus, the Church of the Touring Creator. Note that it has no buildings, no clergy, no rites, no useful scripture (just what you’re reading here) and no dogma. Like Buddhism, no one really cares if you believe. Unlike Buddhism, which teaches reincarnation, there’s no reward or punishment for what you do. You just live your life in the hopes that the TC exists, will show up someday and will deign to speak with us.

Won’t he have some stories!!