Allow: it’s an interesting word choice. I wonder if it is just a step or two away from feeling like you’re not entitled to have any luxuries. And if not, why not? And if you don’t allow yourself any now, would you ever? Every day you don’t is a day lost and since you’re concerned about time …

Except that I think we must do everything possible to prevent the rise of a race of sentient machines. If science fiction has taught us anything, it’s that artificial intelligence never leads to anything good.

What I would like to know is why anything — space, time, matter, energy — exists at all.

But I don’t expect we’ll get the answer to that any time soon. I think it’s fun to speculate on what future history will be like and how our time will be understood in future era, and that’s what good science fiction is for.

Our brains did not evolve to contemplate time of cosmic proportions. We have no way of relating to it, except perhaps desperate like Shelley’s Ozymandias. In the face of the supposed heat death of the universe, why bother doing anything?

Different levels of magnification. From the perspective of the cosmos, our lives are absolutely insignificant. But from the perspective of the chemical processes going on in each of our cells, we ourselves are universes — and we generally don’t go around wondering what our RNA or mitochondria are up to. It’s possible that we too might be cells or organelles of some higher, vastly inconceivable entity.

Fun to speculate, but we can only really function adequately in on the level of days and years. None of us is guaranteed to see tomorrow, so we should try to appreciate each day for its own sake.