The little robot is dying, 14 light-hours from its home planet. Its weak radio queries travel at the speed of light, yet they still take 14 hours to get home. Answers take another 14 hours to return. Its small brain interprets those day-old replies and does the best it can. It wiggles its delicate sensors and transmitter. It fires its little jets. It tries to protect itself, but it doesn’t have much left to fight with. It launched with nearly 700 tons of fuel, but that was 30 years ago. Now it only has 60 pounds of hydrazine left and its plutonium power source will die within 14 years. For the last 30 years it’s been moving at about 38,000 miles per hour relative to its home star, but it’ll still be another 40,000 years before its corpse leaves its home star system. By then, it’ll have traveled over two light-years, yet that’s only half the distance from its home star to the next nearest star, 25 thousand billion miles away. A child of a species that is itself a child, it’s dying, uncomprehending, a thousandth of a light-year from its place of birth—nine billion miles from home.

The robot’s home galaxy is a slow pinwheel of light 100,000 light-years across. Its central bulge, 30,000 light-years wide, is filled with orbiting globular clusters, stellar nurseries, and millions of yellow and white dwarfs, red and blue giants, neutron stars, pulsars, magnetars, black holes. Inside its central bulge, its core bathes in incandescent gas at 18 million degrees Fahrenheit. At its heart, a supermassive black hole spews a huge antimatter fountain straight up. Outside the bulge, a cotton-candy fog of gas and dust haloes the rotating galactic disk. Gigantic gas fountains feed that fog as gas gushes out of the core when many big stars go supernova within a few million years of each other. Their blastwaves hit and mingle, creating blisters of superhot plasma. Those blisters then shoot X-ray-emitting gas plumes 20,000 light-years out from the galactic plane. As that hot gas cools, it falls back onto the disk, precipitating out new stars, like burning raindrops from a slow, majestic storm.

The robot’s home star is one of those burning droplets. An aging yellow dwarf about two-thirds of the way out from the core, it condensed out of the gigantic plasma storm about 4.5 billion years ago. That naked, free-floating fusion reactor is just one of 200 billion other stars in its home galaxy. Burning 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, it vomits out charged particles at over a million miles an hour. That ionized wind generates a supersonic shockwave and ultraviolet glow around the star’s children, like a submarine’s bow-wave. Plowing through the cold ocean of gas and dust at better than half a million miles an hour, the robot’s home system is an egg, headed point first into the unknown. On its quarter-billion-year orbit of the core, that egg cradles a smattering of orbiting dust specks. The star shields them with its bowshock wave as it fries them with an endless sleet of high-energy photons and charged particles.

The robot’s home planet is one of those fried specks. Third out from its star, it’s a spinning blob of silicates and molten iron swathed in a thin crust, a tenuous sheen of liquid water, and a wispy envelope of gases. Lifeforms teem inside that minuscule protective blanket. They’re all molecular cousins, evolving in an inner space fully as vast as the outer space that their planet swims through. They’ve been spreading over the cooling blob for at least the last 3.5 billion years and still they’ve made almost no difference to it. However, very recently—the last 50,000 years—one of those tiny species gained a new level of power. As a result, just 30 years ago it built and launched the little robot probe. Lost in the deeps of space and time, that boisterous, squabbling, child species almost never sees that it’s only a tiny part of something far vaster and far older than itself. As uncomprehending of its purpose as the dying robot it built, it doesn’t have the faintest idea what it is or what it’s for.

The little robot’s story is now ending, as all things must, but its story may be only prelude to a much larger one that’s just begun. Its home galaxy is itself just a speck on the edge of a supercluster ball of thousands of galaxies. That ball is itself just one more dot among millions of superclusters. They’re scattered unevenly like ground cinnamon on a froth of soap bubbles. Those dots group in long curving sheets and strands 300 million light-years long by 200 million light-years wide but only 15 million light-years deep. Yet those vast sheets are mere pinpricks in something yet vaster still since they all move as one at the glacially slow pace of a million miles an hour, as if squeezing together for warmth while oozing down the walls of unthinkably vast, dark, and cold bubbles. Those impossibly large bubbles are themselves mere blips in a cosmos over 13 billion years old and inflated to 156 billion light-years wide. It’s cooled to minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly the coldest there is. For billions of light-years out in every direction the cosmos is mostly dark, cold, and empty. On that scale, the dying robot, the infant species, its fragile planet, its warm star, its raging galaxy, even its gigantic supercluster, are too tiny to stand out among the 70 thousand billion billion thermonuclear specks flung like diamond dust across deep space.

So far, there’s just us out here in the big black, as far as we know. Space is incredibly roomy, and time is as long as there is, but life is only a moment long and a dream wide. It’s fragile and precious. Don’t waste it with a book. Stop reading. Go outside. Look around. Sapere aude. Dare to know.

Gaudete.