They estimate the known universe is 13.773 billion years old; our own solar system is 5 billion; while the Earth is 4.6 billion. Compared to that “deep time,” mankind hasn’t been around long — not much more than a very tiny fraction of 1 second.
Look at the sky on a clear, pitch-black night, and you will see an untold number of stars in that sliver of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Then multiple that small sliver so that it includes all the slivers and so all the myriad stars in our galaxy, but realize that as many stars as that may be — and it is a gigantic number — there are even more whole galaxies than that in the universe.
We are very much taken with ourselves, but, in the total scheme of things, mankind isn’t even so much as a triviality. And we may not even get to that 1 second mark either, through extinction, either by our own foolishness or when our sun begins to expand and reduces the pinprick earth to a cinder.
Yet parents adore their children; young men still aspire to greatness; and old men share their wisdom earned from the rough and tumble of experience.
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Henry's Views 