Islomjon

“The universe is not a miracle. It simply is, unguided and unsustained, manifesting the patterns of nature with scrupulous regularity. Over billions of years it has evolved naturally, from a state of low entropy toward increasing complexity, and it will eventually wind down to a featureless equilibrium. We are the miracle, we human beings. Not a break-the-laws-of-physics kind of miracle; a miracle in that it is wondrous and amazing how such complex, aware, creative, caring creatures could have arisen in perfect accordance with those laws. Our lives are finite, unpredictable, and immeasurably precious. Our emergence has brought meaning and mattering into the world.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Four and a half billion is a number almost beyond reckoning. The current Guinness world record for longevity is held by a French woman who lived to celebrate her 122nd birthday—so humans fall far short of living even for 4.5 billion seconds (about 144 years). All of recorded human history is much less than 4.5 billion minutes. And yet geologists claim that Earth has been around for more than 4.5 billion years.”
― Robert M. Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet

“All lives are different, and some face hardships that others will never know. But we all share the same universe, the same laws of nature, and the same fundamental task of creating meaning and of mattering for ourselves and those around us in the brief amount of time we have in the world.
Three billion heartbeats. The clock is ticking.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“It has been determined that luminous matter—the stars and hot gas we see in the sky by eye and instrument—constitutes a mere 0.5 percent of the total mass of our universe. Another 4.5 percent is nonluminous matter, such as planets and dead stars, made of the same familiar atoms. In addition, 26 percent is composed of something different than atoms or their constituent elementary particles. Dubbed dark matter, it remains unidentified. The remaining, dominant 69 percent of the universe is an even more mysterious dark energy that has resulted in an accelerating expansion of the universe that will continue indefinitely into the future, making the universe increasingly dilute.”
― Victor J. Stenger, God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos