Ever since I was a child, I have loved looking at the stars.

When you look up at the starry sky, your inquisitive mind and delusions about various things are born one after another. This is the same as when I was a child.

Galaxies, nebulae, stars, planets, the earth, living creatures, all kinds of matter, and myself living here and now.

It's nothing but a matter of course, but when I look at the starry sky, I feel something strange and miraculous.

On the earth where billions of people live, only one self, only one self in the universe.

If we observe the Milky Way from the Andromeda Nebula in the future 2.5 million years in the future, we will find ourselves here on Earth. The fact that the Earth is there with Stone Age humans who have just begun to walk upright on the ground on two legs. Even though the Andromeda galaxy is so far away, separated by 2.5 million years, it is the closest galaxy to Earth among the 200 billion galaxies in space.

When viewed from the perspective of the wider universe, the concept of the present in which humans live becomes meaningless.

No matter where you go in the universe, the time of the present is flowing everywhere, but in the vast space of the universe, there is no other place where you can share the present at the same time.

And if you think about it in the theory of relativity, whether it's 100 million light years or 10 billion light years away, the photons of light that have traveled at the speed of light themselves will not age when converted to this world. In an instant, the fact that you have arrived there.

Anyway, the more I think about it while gazing at the starry sky, the more mysteries surround me, and my interest never ends.

Africa is said to be the cradle of mankind. If you look at the Milky Way that traverses the clear night sky, you can imagine the image of the earth floating in the universe and the image of yourself living there. as a very small entity.

We live in a world where conflicts never end, but I wish we could be more considerate of each other and live well. In a universe that stretches infinitely in all directions, we have no place to live except on Earth.

What will mankind do in the far distant future when the sun burns out?

Will it return to space like a wildebeest returning to the earth?

While gazing at the starry sky, my delusions boil one after another and then disappear.

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Takashi Iwamoto