Today I watched the sun set over the
ocean. A hot pink neon ball of flame sinking and disappearing behind
chunks of clouds. Not blood-red, but pink, warm and inviting and the
reason we all find those lights so enticing. A good night that means
just that. Have a good night, and I'll see you in the morning.
And now the stars. The sky is clear,
here, and the light pollution at almost a minimum. As my eyes
adjusted, I could see more and more of them, twinkling with air
currents, their light years or centuries or millennia old. I begin
to understand, when I see the sky in true darkness, just why we tell
so many stories about them.
To think that most of those stars are
at least as large as our sun, and some massively larger, and so far
away that the fastest thing in the universe can't travel the distance
quickly. Some of those lights sent their photons out before Rome was
born, when they were not even yet Etruscans. Some of them sent their
light out before even man began planting seeds, when language and
fire were our greatest technologies.
And long after the last human has
breathed whatever we will breathe by then, they will continue. Not
only the stars as they are now, but the stars that will be born in
later cycles, the ones that now are only the beginnings of swirls of
gas accreting into discs and spheres. Generations of stars will be
born only after we are done, only after our tiny existence is written
in full across whatever parts of the cosmos we choose to visit.
So let's go out there, and see the
beginnings of children whose birth will take the next million years.
There are few things I can think of more worthy of exploration than
everywhere.
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