When You Look at the Stars

 When you look up at the stars, you're not seeing them as they are right now — you're seeing them as they were in the past. That's because light takes time to travel across space. Even the light from the nearest star beyond our Sun, Proxima Centauri, takes over four years to reach us. This means the starlight we see tonight began its journey years, decades, or even millions of years ago. Some of the stars in the night sky may have already died, exploded, or changed completely, but their light is only just arriving. In a very real sense, stargazing is time travel — the farther we look, the further back in time we see. Telescopes allow astronomers to observe galaxies as they were billions of years ago, helping us understand how the universe evolved. Even sunlight takes about eight minutes to reach Earth, so we’re always seeing the Sun as it was, not as it is. Every glance at the cosmos is a glimpse into history. (Peter Keneth Levin)

You really need to love the past, history, everything vintages and antique; to have the curiosity to understand when, where, how it all started: the genesis, the beginning. It makes me appreciate the pretense and how lucky am I to be, exist, and this unique ability to look at the past, live in the present time, and imagine the future.