I found pictures from the Hubble telescope on You Tube and sat entranced as those incredible displays of deep space filled the screen, backed up by space music probably generated from galaxies rubbing against each other. I highly recommend the experience, going to where only Captain Kirk and his starship crew has gone before.
It is mesmerizing as you gaze into the canyons of time while real time in your room slips away. And even the dimmest bulbs among us must have some variation of this thought: WOW! Something must be going on out there.
Yes, William, something is. The obvious first reaction is; given what my eyes are telling me about that vast mysterious void of stars and warped time, should I really give a rip about things that overwhelm me in my boring daily life? The answer is, yes. Deciding what to make for dinner. Deciding what to wear. Must I go to work? Regardless of the awesome spectacle of black holes colliding, what we are seeing happened millions of years ago and we are not in danger of getting sucked into the maw of that violence. Life goes on down here inside the Milky Way Galaxy and taking care of life's minutiae is part of the deal.
The second obvious reaction is; Who or whatever put this whole complex together and made up the rules? One other thing: Were mosquitoes absolutely necessary?
Solving the mystery of the second question has led to tribal warfare from the beginning of tribes to the current alignment of nations. "Accept my God of love or I will have to kill you."
Most space scientists believe our universe was created from a cataclysmic explosion of a sand-grain-sized remnant of a collapsed universe. Nobody has a proveable theory about how that exploding mass of matter received the codes that would create plant and animal life on a small, insignificant planet orbiting a minor sun in what we have named the Milky Way Galaxy.
Buy a telescope and develop your own best scenario. It will probably be as close to the truth as all the others. Working with the slide rule I kept from my mechanical drawing class in high school and my children's space-capturing telescope, I have determined the age of our universe to be 13.82 billion years, give a few weeks one way or the other. I'm still working on Who programmed in the song, "Itsy Bitsy, Teenie Weenie, Yellow Polka Dot Bikini."
