When Infinity Happens

6,605,008,933. According to the US Census Bureau International, this is the number of living human beings inhabiting the Earth at this very moment. How do they come up with that? How can we ever know how much it fluctuates in a world where thousands of people die in a given day? One person dies, another is born. It is the perpetual cycle of life. We are born, we die, and in between...well, we live.

6 billion seems like a big number until you look up at the sky and think that there are an estimated 400 billion stars in our galaxy the Milky Way. And beyond the Milky Way? How many other galaxies exist and how many billions of stars exist in those unknown universes?

Tonight I looked up to see the North Star brilliantly dominating the night sky. For a moment I remembered a night when I slept on the top of a sand dune in the Sahara desert, I remembered staring up at that sky, a sky with billions of stars as far as my eyes could reach. For hours, unable to sleep, I pondered infinity. I felt the weight of the universe over me as my thoughts raced unparalleled to my emotions. In that moment, the vastness of the infinite desert around me was the only thing that could mirror the space above me in the black night sky. An infinite sky that greets us every night, a space that makes everything around us so utterly insignificant.

Space and Time. Both elements are part of the fundamental structure of the universe. Time can be measured, they say, as it is a dimension in which activities occur in sequence. Six billion people move everyday through this time on Earth. The perpetual cycle of time on an Earth that is living, an Earth that was born 4.5 million years ago, and an Earth that will one day die. One day, light years away, someone, something, somewhere will look up at their sky and make a wish upon something that was once planet Earth, and they will do it without even knowing its name.