The spaceship “Nomad” drifted halfway between Mars and
Jupiter. Whatever war catastrophe had wrecked it had taken a sleek steel rocket, one hundred yards long and one hundred feet broad, and mangled it into a skeleton on which was mounted the remains of cabins, holds, decks and bulkheads. Great rents in the hull were blazes of light on the sun side and frosty blotches of stars on the dark side. The S.S. “Nomad” was a weightless emptiness of blinding sun and jet shadow, frozen and silent.

The wreck was filled with a floating conglomerate of frozen
debris that hung within the destroyed vessel like an instantaneous photograph of an explosion. The minute gravitational attraction of the bits of rubble for each other was slowly drawing them into clusters which were periodically torn apart by the passage through them of the one survivor still alive on the wreck, Gulliver Foyle, AS-iz8/i 27oo6.

When you study astronomy, what eventually strikes you is not just the truly extravagant distances involved, but the unimaginable concept of Deep Time. Our lives, and indeed, even our history as a species on this planet, is so brief and ephemeral that it is difficult to comprehend the scale of it all. We stare at one frame of film snipped out of an extremely long movie, and we task ourselves with not only trying to figure out the plot, but how it started, how it will end and what it all means–if it means anything at all.

But you’re wrong about one thing–the part about “long-term planning”. True, maybe we’re just a brief flatulence in the mind of God, but we do have every right to be here, and we are completely entitled to and responsible for the little piece that is allotted to us. The space around us, and the time we spend inhabiting it, is all we have, all we’ll ever have, but it is a great deal, and we are precisely at the very center of it, all the time. Each of us is his own separate universe, and it is a phenomenal gift. It would be unforgivable not to make the most of it as long as we’re here.

I love your wrap-up…”we are staring at an instantaneous photograph of an explosion.” Nice! Humanity will spend its entire existence eking out a living inside a monumental explosion. Makes long-term planning seem kind of silly, really.