Half a Millisecond

A Little Bit Dramatic

I think I speak for a lot of us when I say one of our greatest fears is to die–to enter the unknown and all that comes with it.

Something that really keeps me up at night is the idea of being forgotten. The idea that when my heart rate stops, and my brain waves go quiet, my name will never be uttered again, and it will be as if I had never even existed in this universe.

I suppose this is a bit of a ridiculous nightmare, a tad dramatic. I mean, how can it matter how well I’m remembered after I die? It’s not like I’ll be around to know it.

Nevertheless, the thought remains in the back of my head. A light that will never go out, as strong and consistent as the sun.

Now, put into a larger perspective, it’s a bit laughable–in a morbid kind of way–how large the universe is, and how small we are. In the 13.8 billion years that the universe has been alive, we experience it for less than a blink in comparison. If we condensed the entire lifespan of the universe into a 24-hour day, an average human life would last for about half a millisecond of that day.

That’s shorter than a stroke of lightning. Almost a century reduced to less than the blink of an eye.

Of course, this is anything but comforting to reduce our entire life spans to a beam of light, but light, as our universe has it, is both the fastest and longest-lasting thing to occur. And this is best depicted by the stars.

A Breakdown.

The Sun is an average of 93 million miles away from Earth, year-round. The light from the Sun takes about 8 minutes to reach our eyes, meaning we will always be seeing light from the Sun that is 8 minutes old from the present. It takes 13 minutes to reach Mars, 43 minutes to Jupiter, and 5 and a half hours to reach little Pluto.

The second closest star to Earth is Alpha Centauri, the light from which takes 4.24 years to reach us, and for us to reach it.

Betelgeuse, a red supergiant part of Orion, takes 640 years; that’s roughly how long ago the medieval period was.

The Ring Nebula, some 2,300 light-years away, puts us at the rise of the Roman Empire.

The galaxy Andromeda, 2.5 million light-years away, Earth was entering the Ice Age.

And finally NGC 3972, a spiral galaxy over 65 million light-years away from us. Dinosaurs were roaming their final days on Earth.

All that may be left for us from these ancient periods on Earth are fossils, artifacts, and ruins, but their light carries on, endlessly.

Friends, family, ancestors that have passed, entire civilizations and species we think we no longer have evidence of, are still far out there, actively spreading their light out to the furthest reaches of the universe.

So, a human life may seem short now, but as long as the universe exists, each life will eventually be experienced by it in its entirety. As long as light travels, memories will too. Every breath, blink, or stroke of lightning is actively spreading its way through the universe, being experienced on a scale so large we can’t even fathom it.

Galaxy NGC 3972 must think we are all giant reptiles and birds roaming a luscious green planet. Andromeda sees us beginning to freeze over. The Ring Nebula must think we just discovered plumbing, and Betelgeuse must be appalled at how things have changed since then. Alpha Centauri just witnessed me graduate high school, and our Sun just about made it to the start of my speech.

The universe is so much bigger than us, but it also is us. There’s no fighting it. The light from you yesterday is already on its journey out there, already past the Sun and out of our solar system. And it will continue to do so every day, every moment; it will keep moving forward, even after we are all long gone.

The universe holds every part of our lives all at once, since the day you were born, and the sun hit your face, and every second since then.

These past lives may seem out of reach, but if you look up, you’ll find yourself staring at the history of humanity itself as it reaches the stars far above us. The stars that now show us their pasts from when they lived at the time our ancestors did.

Now, I hope I did my job in finding you all some comfort rather than making you feel small, but of course I completely understand if I only achieved the latter.

To this I say, our lives may be short-lived, like a lightning strike, but they are an endless lightning strike that, with time, the entire universe shall experience, just as we experience it.

The end.