“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

Richard Dawkins wrote that phrase years ago, as the introduction to “Unweaving the Rainbow.” He has since had it ear-marked for his funeral.

There is nothing that can accelerate faster than light. No force, no energy, no matter. Even the force of gravity does not expand out from the source at a greater speed. Many think Einstein said everything is relative. Not quite. He said everything is relative except the speed of light in vacuum. It is C in the equations. It is the constant. The barrier.
Every particle, in some way, affects the particles, and the space, around it. When a particle is in a given position, the effect of it being there radiates out form it at the speed of light, an ever increasing bubble. Outside of that bubble, the particle has not yet reached that position. And inside, it has in all probability moved on.

My time on this planet is, just as yours, the merest flicker. An instant. A nothing. The universe is already 13 billion years old. In another 5, our sun will expand in a heat death that will burn away the surface of the earth. Even this is the tiniest motion of time, compared to the enormity of what will be. Not long after the sun goes, the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our own, we can already see it filling the sky now. And the universe will keep on expanding, we now know that this rate of expansion is increasing. It will go on. In billions of years, when all the stars have burned the stellar fuel, when they have collapsed into black holes or neutron stars or dwarfs, it will still go on. In the cold. In the void. In the dark. Infinitely.

18.99 light years from here there is a star known as GJ 693. Sometime during this week there is a wave front that will pass by this innocuous stellar body. That wave front is the event of my birth, it is the fact of my existence. 18.99 light years away, I, right now, am being born. When I die, many years hence I hope, that wave front will still be moving out, adding more and more stars to the 91 it has already passed. Even in the infinity of physics time, I will always be being born. Every event of my life is another wave front, just as is every event of yours. When you were born, your first words, your first steps, your first laugh and your first cry. The first time you heard a bar of Mozart, or saw a Van Gogh. The first time you fell in love, and the first time you fell out of it. Every event on your existence is an ever increasing bubble, no experience, no moment of joy, or sadness, will every die. It keeps going. Forever.

You can make of these thoughts what you will, I doubt very much that they are new thoughts to the world, but I was thinking them tonight, and I have decided to engulf you in them too. They might make you feel very big, or very, very small. Personally, I feel a little of both. If you don't feel either, then read it again until you do.