if you ever get bored...

...or run out of ways to boggle your mind:

Cast your eyes to the heavens.

Those entrancing, twinkling lights you see are a series of photons flung out hundreds of millions or billions of years ago in the process of Hydrogen, Helium, or Carbon fusion. Fusion, caused by gravity so powerful as to instantaneously break you into your constituent atoms if you happened to be teleported suddenly there one day while minding your own business. Perhaps you were buying coffee at the local cafe or gazing into you lover's eyes one sublime moment, and the next sublime moment you notice you are compressed to the size of a cherry and you have a bit of a fever. Only you wouldn't really notice those things because the electrons and chemical transmissions in what used to be your brain that would have conspired to make you think such thoughts are now zinging off to play in that nuclear inferno. My advice would be to think mellow thoughts. Nobody likes a disgruntled star.

Those photons you see, some of them traveling since before life began on this planet, came all this way, millennia upon millennia, to end their epic journey *splat* right there on your retina. You, standing on a giant, spinning ball of rock and ocean, slinging around your very own class G2 star, which is in turn screaming through space in orbit around the black hole in the center of your spiral galaxy. Oh, yeah, that galaxy is hurtling faster and faster across the universe, too. That photon just spent 2 billion years moving with all haste possible just to land on your retina at particular location at this particular time. Don't you feel special now? No? Ok, whatever, Mr. Chaotic Dynamics Guy. Or Girl. You know who you are.

Think also on this: some of those 'stars' up there are not stars at all, but other galaxies brimming with their own stars and black holes and nebulae and quasars and dark matter. Some of those galaxies are really far away -- 30 billion light years, even. You'll need a telescope to see them, but they're there. That means it would take those photons 30 billion years to hit your retina from their source. And yet, you say, the universe is only 13.45 billion years old! Well, WTF, man? So now shit really gets crazy.

We can't be looking at light from some galaxy that's older than the whole universe. Also, those galaxies we can see at this distance are fully formed, replete with stars and structure. So not only can we see these things that are so far away, we see them as they were many years after the Big Bang. Also, if everything started at a single point at the Big Bang, how in the hell did stuff get further away from us than 13 billion years? Those galaxies must have been going hella fast. Faster than the speed of the light. By a lot.

Ok, so it turns out that space and time unfurled from the Big Bang faster than the speed of light. For a little while, at least. That doesn't mean that matter within space expanded faster than light, but that the fabric of spacetime itself did. Like, if you put metal bearings on a sheet of rubber and then stretched the rubber out in all directions. But, you know, stretch it faster than the speed of light. Whoa.

Hold on while I go throw up.

...

Anyway, my point is this: this universe we live in is fucked up, crazy, intense, amazing. The beauty and complexity and vastness of it all is more proof of God, or Gods, or whatever, than I've ever seen. For me, the universe, seen in this light -- with it's unceasing synchronicities and chaos and unforeseens and unknowables and the way it all conspires to make a coherent whole, a big picture that, at this moment in our little nook of it, allows my life, our life, life itself to continue -- is God. There's no better object of my worship and devotion than the universe as it is and what's going on it right now.

Yeah, Universe, keep on truckin'.