A benefit of being intrigued by astronomy from an early age is getting the idea early that some day the sun will die and consume the Earth as it grows into a red giant.

I used to imagine what that day might look like 4 billion years from now. What will our planet's landscape look like when the sun starts showing differences, perhaps differences in strength, in warmth, in color, in size? How fast will the sun take to consume itself and lose its gravitational ability to hold its gases, how fast will it grow in our sky, filling our sky, burning away our atmosphere?

Four billion years from now. The likelihood that humanity will survive that long is astronomically remote. It was only 65 million years ago that dinosaurs roamed the earth. Humans have maybe 3,000 to 5,000 years of recorded history.

We've survived no more than a century of having the capability of destroying ourselves either directly through nuclear war, or indirectly through ruining our planet. And the way things are going, it would be a miracle if we survived even another hundred years.

It would take an enlightenment greater than humanity has ever seen to survive longer than that. Sometimes I want to live as long as possible just to see as much of humanity's changes as possible.

So much is happening in astronomy now, it's intriguing. The universe shaped like a doughnut? That is just so cool! The possibilities boggle the mind! I used to have trouble getting my mind around the concept of the Big Bang, when all matter in our current universe was contained in an infinitely dense point. Does Euclidean geometry exist when there is no universe? Or to quote Carl Sagan, "To make apple pie, you must first create the universe".

What we think of as a "point" may only be an abstract concept when referring to the Big Bang. It didn't exist in space or time, because space and time didn't exist. It may have "existed" in a completely different dimension. With our three dimensional minds, it is virtually impossible to visualize what the Big Bang occurred in. It certainly was not something like the period at the end of this sentence.

We live in three dimensions of space, and one of time, in a universe with 10 dimensions theorized. But maybe the third dimension is the most advanced? No, maybe not advanced, perhaps most cohesive, the most physical, the most "complete". Dimensional space is hard to get my mind around. I'm fine with the three dimensional universe existing within a four dimensional matrix, but the theory is that most of the other dimensions are microscopic. Does size matter or doesn't it?

It's hard to grasp the idea of microscopic dimensions because as we think of microscopic as being very, very small, and how can something like a dimension be so small, a single microscopic point? What is it, a virus? Can you squash it like a bug?

And yet. We concern ourselves with the economy, with bombs falling on Baghdad, with innocent people dying, with world politics, with paying for education, with quality of living.

We don't concern ourselves with the sky above us and the earth below us, and our neighbors, as human beings, around us. So who cares what the landscape of the Earth will look like 4 billion years from now? Maybe humanity will decimate itself and a new life form will evolve. A lot can happen in 4 billion years. A lot can happen in a hundred years. A lot can happen in a month.

I hate morning. It's the most depressing and mentally oppressive time of day.