We forget an even bigger picture — a universe wrapped around us, a cosmos on which we, planet Earth, are like a tiny sequin on a massive dark coat, a space so large, distance can only be measured by light, one beam travelling 1,86,000 miles in one second, crossing six trillion miles in one light-year, our lives located in nebulae which spreads billions of light-years out from Earth. It isn’t hard to lose track of life — our real life, that is. Not the one we lead, smothered in noise and heat, wrapped in pettiness and pettifogging, spent in arguments over mostly nothing. That is the living we develop, where everyday ‘wins’ — from debates to wars — look larger than the very fact of life. In all the tin and din, we gradually overlook the miracle of being, our existence on a planet of rain, breeze and skies the colour of a tangerine.
This is not a lonely place — the nebulae is thriving with galaxies of gas, dust and stars. Many have their own attendant planets, just like our solar system. Scientists, philosophers and artists alike are fascinated by the possibility that somewhere amidst all those rich worlds, there may be another, drenched in life. As of now, among some hundred billion known galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars, all with their planets, plumes and moons, Earth is the only known place harbouring life, our parent unique even in our own solar neighbourhood, where other planets are covered with sand, dust and ice. Yet, we, the children of Earth, are inextricably linked to space for we are descended from its very core. Earth formed from interstellar gas and dust. Lightning and ultraviolet rays from the sun broke down molecules of our early atmosphere — the products dissolved in oceans, from where emerged a molecule which could copy itself, deoxyribonucleic acid — DNA — from whose twists and turns all organisms, from a snail to your neighbour, have evolved.