Specks in space and time are we?

When you contemplate the Milky Way in the night, don't you feel being a grain in the universe? Maybe smaller than a grain?

How small are we?

If you consider the time since the universe began, which is about 13.8 thousand million years, and put that history in a 100 volume encyclopedia with 1380 pages per volume. We appear around the beginning of the last page and hope to understand all the enigmas in the universe in our lifetime... "life has more imagination than we carry in our dreams" (Christopher Columbus).

Experts say that our observable universe has between 100 to 200 thousand million galaxies. And each Galaxy has on average about 100 thousand million stars. We're in one of those stars.

In both space and time, we're a tiny being and fraction of what's out there in the universe. This gives us a perspective about who we are.

We're the speck in the universe that has a mind of its own. Beholding the vastness of the Cosmos we should learn humility and the possibility we don't know everything. That's overwhelming and - against all odds - hopeful.

We're small. I know. But without oxygen we couldn't survive, right? Do you know the volume of an oxygen molecule? It's about 27 orders of magnitude smaller than our average volume. I mean 0.0000... (27 zeros) ...0001 smaller. And our life depends on that smallness. This reminds me of Dr. Seuss story "Horton hears a who"... "a person is a person no matter how small".

We matter. You matter. That is what I see contemplating the stars. The greatness of being so small. In our littleness, we're able to think how beautiful this universe is, how much we can explore, how many unknowns that can be known. Remember the Joker in Tim Burton's Batman: "So much to do and so little time."

So. Not only had we to handle being small in space vastness, we also need to handle time.

What is time?

St. Augustine answered this question with "If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know." Wisdom.

Since part of my field in Mechanical Engineering in Thermodynamics, time directly results from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In any process of transferring energy, there's always a part of it that is lost, and irreversibilities are generated. This is where the concept of entropy enters the way we picture reality, expressing those irreversibilities.

In simple terms, nothing will ever be like it was before.

This is why time has an arrow pointing forward.

This is why each moment is, in fact, unique.

If our time within the universe history is but an instant, we could think of ourselves as moments in that history. Unique moments. Unrepeatable. Each one of us.

And that is worth living for.