1.
I think the first time I became fully aware that our lives might not have inherent meaning was around 2009.
I was in second grade. At that time, watching videos meant using our family desktop computer and connecting through dial up internet.
One day, on a video website, I clicked a rough, translated version of a BBC documentary about the Big Bang and the origin of the universe. I did not know many characters yet, and I could not really follow the subtitles, so my understanding was partial. Still, I was immediately captivated. The universe was so vast that the word itself felt almost magical to me. In the weeks that followed, I watched the documentary again and again. I found an extra notebook from kindergarten, a B5 sized spelling notebook in landscape orientation, and I also found a children’s astronomy magazine. I cut out the illustrations from the magazine and pasted them into the notebook. Before long, the pages filled up with an entire solar system.
A bullet travels at about 280m/s, which is roughly 1000km/h, about the speed of a jet. If we fired a bullet from Earth toward the Sun, it would take 17 years to reach the Sun. If we imagine the Sun as a basketball and place that basketball in London, then under the same scale, the nearest star to the Sun, a slightly smaller star called Proxima Centauri, would have to be placed in Mumbai or Miami. Voyager travels at about 60,000 km/h, 60 times faster than a bullet. Even for Voyager, it would take 80,000 years to travel from the London basketball to the Miami basketball. That means if we fired a bullet from the Sun, it would take 480,000 years for it to reach the nearest star to the Sun. Both the Sun and Proxima Centauri are ordinary stars in an ordinary galaxy, and the Milky Way is only one ordinary galaxy in the observable universe. If a basketball in London represents the Sun, we would need to line up 23,000 of those London to Miami distances to cross the Milky Way. To reach the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, we would need 590,000 basketballs. To cross the observable universe, we would need about 21.9 billion. The farthest human made probe, Voyager 1, is only about 40m away from that London basketball. It has been traveling for almost 50 years, and it still has not made it out of the school gate.
The Sun’s diameter is about 109 times Earth’s. If we scale down so that the Sun is a 24cm basketball, Earth would be only about 2.2mm across, like a tiny sesame seed placed 26 meters away. From this, one conclusion can be drawn. If the Sun were a basketball, then within a radius of thousands of kilometers, there would be almost nothing at all, except for a few stars that might be like tennis balls or ping pong balls.
The universe is not made of matter. The universe is made of emptiness, and matter is only a rare decoration that appears from time to time.
From a time scale perspective, the average lifespan of a species in Earth’s history is usually between 1 million and 10 million years. For mammals, it tends to be shorter, roughly 1 to 2 million years. Modern Homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago. If a bullet had been fired from Proxima Centauri at the moment the first genetic mutation produced a modern human, that bullet still would not have reached the Sun by today. By the same logic, if our species were to last about as long as the average mammal, we might have around 1.7 million years of natural time left. In that span, a bullet would travel the Sun to Proxima Centauri distance about 4 times. Voyager 1’s path so far would cover only about 26.7 basketball distances in the scale model where the Sun is a basketball in London and Proxima Centauri is a basketball in Miami. Compared with the larger scales, that is 26.7 out of 23,000 across the Milky Way, 26.7 out of 590,000 to Andromeda, and 26.7 out of 21.9 billion across the observable universe.
26.7/230000, 26.7/590000, 26.7/21900000000.
2.
Imagine compressing the entire 13.8 billion year history of the universe into a single year of 365 days. In this scale, 12:00 a.m. on January 1 is the Big Bang, and 12:00 a.m. on December 31 is this exact second. One day is about 37.8 million years, one hour is about 1.58 million years, one minute is about 26,000 years, and one second is about 438 years. On this calendar, Earth forms in early September. Dinosaurs appear on December 25. They go extinct on December 30. And at 11:52 p.m. on December 31, Homo sapiens finally arrive. Human civilization, roughly ten thousand years, lasts for about 23 seconds. In a cosmic story that runs for what would feel like years or even hundreds of millions of years, human civilization is only a faint spark that flashes and disappears right as the New Year countdown ends.
Carl Sagan once said, We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. It is a beautiful, romantic idea. But if one human life is eighty years, then on this cosmic calendar it is about 0.18 seconds. The star dust that makes up our bodies, and the life we struggle so hard to live, occupies only 0.18 seconds in the universe’s year. That is even shorter than a single blink, which is usually about 0.3 seconds. On the scale of the universe, before you can even finish blinking, a whole life is already over.
From where we stand now, if we look at the second year of the universe on the same scale where 13.8 billion years equals one year, the human species is about one hour and five minutes away from the average natural extinction point, which corresponds to roughly 1.7 million years. In a very lucky scenario, we might transform into a new species and last a few more hours, or even a few more days.
About five billion years from now, which would be around May 12 of next year on this cosmic calendar, the Sun will expand dramatically, likely engulfing Mercury and Venus, and possibly Earth, as it enters the red giant stage. By around July 18 of next year, it will shed its outer layers and leave behind a dense core as a white dwarf. Still, red giants and white dwarfs are far beyond what humans need to worry about in any practical sense.
If we focus instead on the point when Earth becomes uninhabitable, that is estimated to happen in about one billion years, when the Sun grows brighter and begins to evaporate Earth’s oceans. On the cosmic calendar, that lands around January 26 of next year. In Earth’s history, almost no multicellular species persists for a billion years without going extinct or evolving in a fundamental way. Even if humans did not go extinct, one billion years would be enough time for Homo sapiens to evolve into a completely different species, just as one billion years ago our ancestors were single celled or very simple multicellular organisms.
If we break survival into four major filters, an evolutionary filter shaped by genetic drift and selection pressures, an Earth environment filter such as supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, and geomagnetic reversals, a human made risk filter such as nuclear war, engineered pathogens, and uncontrolled AI, and an astronomical end game filter driven by the Sun’s increasing brightness, then the probability that Homo sapiens as a biological species survives for one billion years is estimated to be less than 10^-31. That is about one in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Even if we struggle with everything we have, and even if we change beyond recognition, we may still not last long in the vast ocean of time.
Whether we look at time or space, we are tiny, and we are always even smaller than we imagine.
Life appears through an almost impossible chain of coincidences, like a miracle, and then disappears in a way that feels both natural and meaningless. On a more familiar scale, if the asteroid had not struck Earth 66 million years ago, most mammals, including our own ancestors, might still have been scattered, mouse like creatures crawling under dinosaur claws and hiding wherever they could.
I sometimes wonder whether people who have Megalophobia feel uneasy when they look into the night sky.
The light we see has traveled for so long to reach us. When we gaze at the stars, we are always seeing the past, and in fact we are seeing different moments of the past at the same time.
For me as a teenager, the immensity of the universe and the smallness and randomness of life gave me a strange sense of relief, as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It felt like a kind of comfort. Everything is just a drop in the ocean. Life has no built in meaning. You do not matter, I do not matter, none of us matters. When I thought this way, my whole body felt as if it were soaking in a warm, soft hot spring. It was calming.
It was like making a small hole in a cramped eggshell. In the city where I lived, I could not see stars at night, so I looked toward an imagined sky through a crack in reality.
Retrospectively speaking, I think that lightness may have come from two reasons. First, when we think about something truly vast, and when we feel how small we are, the pain, sadness, anxiety, and daily struggles in front of us can start to feel feather light and less overwhelming. Second, this way of thinking allowed me to step away from reality for a moment, not only from daily life, but also from the responsibilities that reality demands, because when everything feels meaningless, the responsibilities I am supposed to carry can seem to disappear as well.
2.
In the later years of elementary school, we started learning physics. The second law of thermodynamics says that in an isolated system, total entropy, or disorder, never decreases. It only increases or stays the same. Time is a one way arrow. It moves forward without hesitation, and its direction points toward the future.
My understanding of the meaning of life is also grounded in time. When I say life has no meaning, I am using meaning in a specific sense. I mean that life would need to create an impact along the arrow of time, and that impact would need to survive until the very end of the arrow.
More formally, I define the meaning of life in two ways.
1) the meaning of life is the capacity of a causal perturbation introduced at a specific point on the time axis to survive thermodynamic dissipation and produce a non zero difference in the universe’s terminal macroscopic state. In other words, it is the ability of an influence created at one moment to resist being washed out by entropy and still change the final outcome, however far in the future that final state may be.
2) from an information theory perspective, the meaning of life can be defined by whether information about that life can be effectively decoded at the end of the time arrow, which is to say, whether its causal chain is not erasable. If, in the heat death or terminal state of the universe, the system’s microstate still contains distinctive features that evolved from the original state of your life, and those features cannot be explained by random fluctuations, then life has meaning. If not, then under this definition, life does not.
Unfortunately, if time is an axis, it is simply too long. No life can reach the end of that arrow. Whether we think as an individual, a family, a community, a species, or life itself, the final outcome is the same. In the end there is emptiness and no lasting result. Even the greatest Homo sapiens, even the greatest forms of life, may leave only a few thousand years of traces, which is just 2.3 to 6.9 seconds on the universe calendar.
Under the rule of the second law of thermodynamics, every impact eventually becomes heat, spread evenly through a silent universe. That means that at maximal entropy, all structure dissolves into uniform chaos, and no information is preserved to the end. It also means that an individual worldline does not have a decisive influence on the topology or the distribution of matter on the universe’s final Cauchy surface. In that sense, life has no meaning.
In elementary school language and history classes, my teachers often talked about poems, ancient figures, heroes, and famous stories. They emphasized success and the idea of becoming immortal in reputation, remembered for thousands of years. Yet even when someone’s life looked dramatic and extraordinary, it was hard for me to believe it was more meaningful than anyone else’s.
In private, I wondered whether the versions recorded in history become unrecognizable through generations of retelling, shaped by compounding errors, until a person’s name turns into an abstract symbol without a real, living face. We are dust within dust. We are ants, cells, microbes, viruses, and perhaps even parasites. Maybe it is not worth making “leaving a trace for a thousand years” the goal of an entire life. The difference between 2.3 seconds and 0.18 seconds is not that large, and a few thousand years is still very short.
At this point, the impact of believing that life has no meaning becomes clear. It destroys many intersubjective, human made constraints and the usual frameworks of achievement and external evaluation from the society. Those systems suddenly feel worthless. Once everything, including our own lives, no longer carries inherent meaning, something interesting happens. This can actually provoke a deeper reflection on subjectivity.
Because these frameworks and judgments no longer feel real in any ultimate sense, the focus shifts. Rather than chasing recognition from others, what may truly matter is how I, as a subject, take control of my own life trajectory. Even if there is no inherent meaning, I can still ask what parts of life I can genuinely enjoy, and what I can consciously choose.
If you follow this path far enough, it can lead toward hedonism, or toward existentialism, or it can leave you circling in the corner of nihilism.
3.
In high school, I developed a habit of watching war films, and it has stayed with me ever since. Some of the films I have watched include All Quiet on the Western Front, 1917, Dunkirk, The Wannsee Conference, Darkest Hour, Schindler’s List, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Jojo Rabbit, and many others.
I am drawn to war films because they make everything in ordinary peacetime life feel precious. Relationships, life itself, and education suddenly look fragile and invaluable. At the same time, many everyday worries and pains shrink into something much smaller. When I watch these films, I often imagine myself as a soldier, living each day in fear of death and in numbness, forced to harm my own kind for something that had no inherent meaning, and forced to convince myself that my actions were noble. I imagine watching my companions die one by one, while my own life feels only a single bullet away from ending at any moment. I picture myself charging forward on pure survival instinct, struggling to stay alive, thinking desperately about how to avoid the next shot, while knowing that the so called enemy is simply one of us.
I also imagine being a seventeen year old student during the time of the Southwest Associated University, when the homeland was invaded and occupied. I imagine moving through gunfire and explosions, walking thousands of miles, and then, in the little spare time available, seizing every chance to read, discuss, and attend class. I imagine the passion of youth, raising one’s voice, and calling others to protect the country and fight for change. The contrast is hard to ignore. At the same age of seventeen, depending on the era, or simply on where you live on the planet, some people spend each day at the edge of survival, underfed and underclothed, fighting only to stay alive and to create a chance for more people to live. Others sit in spacious classrooms, run on open tracks, and suffer over heartbreak, grades, heavy coursework, strict parents, and disappointments, sometimes even debating whether these worries are enough to end their own lives.
When I put down what I was reading at the time, The Kite Runner or All Quiet on the Western Front, and returned to my own classroom, it often felt like stepping between two different worlds. In my diary, I wrote, “To feel troubled by ordinary, trivial things is a kind of happiness, because it means there is no greater pain than this.”
“The today you waste is the tomorrow someone who died yesterday once prayed for.”
I watch war films because the shock of life, in its rawest form, never stops moving me.
To be continued…