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Even if it’s just for a few minutes, not even every night, and sometimes with a lot clouds keeping me from seeing much, I still relish when I look up at night into the cold vastness of space. The possibilities it holds intrigue me to no end. Is there life? Is that life intelligent? What do those twinkling dots look like up close? How vast and magnificent are these distant suns compared to ours? What of the worlds that surround many of them? Could they hold the key to the existence of life other than ours? Are they habitable for humans, should the lucky few of us escape the almost certain self-destruction our petty conflicts are bound to rain upon our species? Are there any elements there that could provide us with the key to finding a perpetual source of energy that we can utilize efficiently, or perhaps to extend our lifespan to hundreds, if not thousands of years?

So many questions, and a lot being answered by brilliants minds today… those who detach themselves from the futility of religion or politics in favor of gaining knowledge about the vast universe in which we are a part of. We are part of the void and within it are the unknown, the bizarre, but are eventually understandable. If we seek to understand ourselves, we must understand our universe. We must understand the void, and how we fit in it; how we are a part of it.

Some might only see darkness when they look up into the void at night, and the twinkling of the dim and distant stars… but what I see is our past: how we came to be, as we orbit our own sun; how, through hundreds of millions of years, we have survived and honed our species to be the intelligent, inquisitive, and unfortunately, oftentimes destructive creatures that we are today; and I see the future: the possibilities and potential to terraform, to colonize a new planet and start anew, away from our old hatreds and bigotries towards one another, learning from the mistakes of our ancestors, long destroyed by their own hands through petty wars and fascism. A few minutes, looking up into the darkness, and you can see the truth about yourself, about those around you, and the pointlessness of all the conflict that exists in what is ultimately a tiny, desperate, floating rock at the edge of an average galaxy, among a whole universe full of such.

Forget what you know. Forget your hate or your anger. Forget what you were told to believe that only serves divides you from your brethren. You’re just as part of the enormous, empty void as they are, and as I am, and will forever be.