Why We Look Up: Cosmic Mayflies
Jennifer Willis
We live our lives in a blink of universal time.
In the inaugural season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Captain Nahla Ake gives a thoughtful and rousing address to her cadets as their starship circles the fictional Val Nebula. “I’m struck by its very existence,” she says of the nebula. “The incalculable number of atoms that had to converge in this tiny patch of a seemingly infinite universe. This nebula was once a star. It could not have evolved into this present without every moment of its...