What is this world that we inexplicably find ourselves in? Were we placed here by some unknown intelligence for some unfathomable reason? Or is it all just a huge joke, that it's all just meaningless fortuity and happenstance that we find ourselves in existence now and having such thoughts?
If that were not enough, this world, this reality we find ourselves in, is highly strange. Consider our situation. We exist, apparently, on the surface of a small sphere that is suspended in the midst of an effective eternal, cold, dark, nothingness. An effective nothingness utterly inhospitable and even possibly entirely bereft of any complex life apart from on this one tiny planet. When we gaze up in wonder and forlorn hope seeking to understand why we're here, what it all means, what our role might be, whether there is other life out there, the stars merely gaze back down at us with cold pitiless indifference.
I find our situation to be highly peculiar. Certainly not something I thought about as a child, but the weirdness of our situation has slowly dawned on me the older and older I get. And even at my relatively advanced age, the feeling of weirdness continues to grow.
Perhaps we will eventually find out the answer to such questions in some unknown reality after we die, perhaps we won't. Personally, I feel that we will.
When I was a child and looked up to the Milky Way, I did not at all see a cold, pitiless indifference. Quite the contrary. It was the very concrete perception of the existence of a cosmic intelligence. This feeling never left me since then.
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