The Universe, our home, is a place of unfathomable unimaginable scales. Mother Space-Time and Father Entropy alone fully understand its machinations, while crunching the numbers is the domain of deities. A humble wave of light travelling from one dark corner to the other—though in all probability, it’s shape is not of a geometry that is discernable to the human mind, so lacks ‘corners’—would take billions of years to traverse. It is an old container—in fact by definition, as old as time—having seen trillions of dawns. It contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, each home to countless more stars, most with their own solar systems. Despite centuries of searching, we are still yet to find sentience beyond the realms of our small blue planet. And yet, as rare as this Earth-evolved sentience seems been, many being have experienced it. Myriad lives have come into being before succumbing to death and entropy. Billions upon billions of individual creatures, over aeons, experiencing this thing we call ‘life.’ Of this multitude of life, a tiny fraction have been human—born during different eras, in different climes, living different lives. We are all just one among the tally of many, both past and present; reminiscent of a small twinkling star nestled with many more in a galaxy, surrounded by countless other galaxies containing the same. While mathematicians no doubt have a name for the sliver of probability defining the infinitesimal coincidence that we even exist at all, comprehending it—truly understanding it—is beyond our frail faculties.
With all that in mind, it is a wise use of your time to be anything but present?
