13.6 billion years ago. A space rapidly  expands. A slew of particles scatters  

across it. A skyline of stars begins to form. 12.9 billion years ago. Gravity brings together  

matter from across the open cosmic sea to  form the first galaxies—islands of vast  

localized gas and dust and stellar objects  held together across gravitational strings. 

4.5 billion years ago, a cloud of gas and  dust orbits a young star in a quiet region  

of an ordinary galaxy. It coalesces tighter  and tighter, eventually forming a planet. A  

single planet in a single galaxy amongst  incalculable others across the universe. 

3.8 billion years ago. Life on this planet begins. 2.6 million years. Tools are  

made and used by living things. 150 thousand years ago. Language, abstract  

thinking, and the burgeoning of culture begins. Today. 

On the scale of one minute, the entire history  of modern humanity lasted roughly the last eight  

ten-thousandths of a second. Put differently, if  the entire history of the universe were compressed  

into one day, modern humanity wouldn’t  appear until after the last single second.  

A blink. And each of our individual lives take  place within this second, lasting around four  

ten-thousandths of that fraction of a fraction of  a fraction. And the universe has only just begun. 

Here we are, within this tiny,  infinitesimal moment of time,  

so tied up with it, with everything we are  and everything we do. We think this sliver  

of something means everything, because to us,  it does. But to everything, we mean nothing. 

When referring to the Pale Blue Dot  photo taken by the Voyager 1 space probe,  

showing Earth from a record  distance away, Carl Sagan said: 

“On [that] everyone you love, everyone you know,  everyone you ever heard of, every human being who  

ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate  of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident  

religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines,  every hunter and forager, every hero and coward,  

every creator and destroyer of civilization,  every king and peasant, . . . every "superstar,"  

every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner  in the history of our species lived there--on  

a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam .  . . Think of the rivers of blood spilled  

by all those generals and emperors so that,  in glory and triumph, they could become the  

momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. . .  Our posturings, our imagined self-importance,  

the delusion that we have some privileged  position in the Universe, are challenged by  

this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely  speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”

One day, you appear on this planet. Soon,  the days turn into a flipbook, your life  

becoming an animated film containing  everything you know and care about;  

everything you fear and dread.  But what feels like a film to you,  

will in fact more like a single frame  in an infinite film to everything else. 

You don’t know how you got here. You  don’t know why you are here. You don’t  

know how any of this really works or  where any of it is going. No one does.  

And before you know it, you won’t be here at all.  No one will. Don’t worry. Like the entire history  

of the universe before you, the entire future  of it will be over before you know it as well. 

If you’re lucky, in let’s say eighty years, you  close your eyes for the last time. Your children,  

grandchildren, friends and family,  whatever amount you still have left,  

if any, attend your funeral. They cry for  a little while. Then, they mostly move on.  

They have to in order to survive themselves. In two hundred years, all direct traces of  

you are lost. Memories of you—how you looked,  talked, and acted, what you did and didn’t do,  

the distant blur of your story—have all dissolved  away with the last person who knew of you.  

By now, all perceptions of you had become  inaccurate distortions and projections anyway,  

void of any authentic connection. If you  did something especially noteworthy during  

your lifetime, direct traces of you may  continue for a little. But not much longer. 

In 100 thousand years, the twenty-first century  is but a strange section in the record of history,  

occasionally reflected on by individuals that  no longer relate to it in any meaningful way. 

5 million years. Most of the Earth’s  pre-existing species are extinct due  

to the background extinction rate. They  have all been replaced with new species. 

1 billion years. There is no life left on Earth. 

5.5 billion years. The sun cools and expands,  consuming the Earth completely. A once lively  

planet billions of years old wiped out  without a trace—a grand finale of a light  

show with no ovation. The sun is dead. The  Earth is gone. The universe doesn’t notice.  

There is so much time left. 100 trillion years. The last  

remaining stars begin to die, fading  out and burning up. Their gravesites  

are marked by the tombstones of newly formed  blackholes. The universe becomes an expanding  

graveyard of the bones of evaporating stars. 1 duodecillion. Black holes swallow all the  

remaining stray matter of the universe. They  will soon be all that remains. We will be here  

a while. Most of the universe’s lifetime  is spent in these demented elderly years. 

Between one googol and one googolplex. The  last massive black hole evaporates. One last  

explosion of light and energy occurs,  closing the final eye of the universe.  

Time is no longer. Everything that has ever  happened has now, in so far as everything  

is concerned, never happened. The universe  returns to nothing, and nothing happens forever. 

Of course, this is all speculation. The  universe could be infinite. It could be  

cyclical. It could be something else entirely.  The story of the universe may have gone and may  

continue to go nearly an infinite number of  different ways—most of which we likely can’t  

even begin to imagine let alone estimate  and predict. What we can know, however,  

is that somehow we are here apart of that story. Of all the things that could exist, of all the  

things that never will, for some reason,  we are each one of the things that does. 

While we are here, we will experience things, we  will cry, we will laugh, we will hopefully love,  

we will know what it means to have awoken as  an embodied collection of dead particles onto  

a strange, lushly coated wet rock floating  through a vast expanse of energy and matter  

made from and destine for apparent nothingness.  We will worry. We will dread. We will try. We  

will fail. We will move on. We will die. We  will be forgotten. But for now, we are here. 

In truth, even if we could, to fully take in  the profundity of what is going on in every  

moment would rupture our ability to carry out  the everyday. But likewise, not considering  

the absurdity and insanity of what’s taking place  around and through us, at least on occasion, can  

cause us to easily become submerged into falsity,  into mundanity, into misunderstanding, into  

unnecessary anxiety and stress. While we are here,  our lives naturally consume us. But in the end,  

insignificance consumes all life. And considering  this, at least on occasion, can perhaps help us  

better see and decide what we truly want  to be consumed by while we are still here.  

Because soon, the rest of the universe will  continue on indifferently until it all ends—or  

continues on forever. Regardless, you almost  certainly won’t be around for any of it, and it  

will all be over so, so quickly. Blink. That’s  how long the rest of the universe will feel.