Last autumn I found myself among the mountains of Tibet, wandering through the high desert created by the rain shadow of the mighty Himalayas, looking up at the cascade of unblinking stars that stretched across the night sky. The stars, in their steady glow, revealed a rather strange sight that I could best describe as being both disturbing and fascinating at the same time. It felt like they were giving me an exclusive window to look at the inner workings of the world and everything in it.
According to the scientific community, the universe began its "life" roughly 14 billion years ago when space, time and even the atoms in our bodies formed in less than a blink of an eye. The universe expanded rapidly - from the size of a pin's head to that of the entire Solar System in less than a few seconds, and it is still growing to form the cold, dark and inhospitable vastness that we know today. Among all the …show more content…
Life as we know it is a relatively new addition to an already vast universe, let alone the mind that is capable of formulating the concept of a soul/conscience. Moreover, our sun, which it in its late age will begin to run out of helium, will bloat up like a swollen grape to engulf all the inner planets of our Solar System, including Earth. There will be no trace of our grandiose civilisations, our monumental discoveries or our ethical doctrines or our species in general. A few billion years into the future, at the onset of the universe's heat death, the stars in the night sky will begin to go out. One by one, they will start collapsing into themselves and flickering out like a candle in the wind till the universe is restored to its initial stage of cold darkness, just as it was before the Big Bang. Life, on the grand scale, will be nothing more than a fluke that took place on a tiny planet in an obscure little solar system that died as suddenly as it had originated, while the universe continued on its cosmic
According to the scientific community, the universe began its "life" roughly 14 billion years ago when space, time and even the atoms in our bodies formed in less than a blink of an eye. The universe expanded rapidly - from the size of a pin's head to that of the entire Solar System in less than a few seconds, and it is still growing to form the cold, dark and inhospitable vastness that we know today. Among all the …show more content…
Life as we know it is a relatively new addition to an already vast universe, let alone the mind that is capable of formulating the concept of a soul/conscience. Moreover, our sun, which it in its late age will begin to run out of helium, will bloat up like a swollen grape to engulf all the inner planets of our Solar System, including Earth. There will be no trace of our grandiose civilisations, our monumental discoveries or our ethical doctrines or our species in general. A few billion years into the future, at the onset of the universe's heat death, the stars in the night sky will begin to go out. One by one, they will start collapsing into themselves and flickering out like a candle in the wind till the universe is restored to its initial stage of cold darkness, just as it was before the Big Bang. Life, on the grand scale, will be nothing more than a fluke that took place on a tiny planet in an obscure little solar system that died as suddenly as it had originated, while the universe continued on its cosmic