Not Sure If You Can Return This One
All I want for Christmas is a peek at all the wonderous and mysterious mechanisms that control the universe.
I want to hear the creaking, ticking, wheezing, and clanking of the infinite’s clockworks. It’s delicate machinery relies solely on the laws of physics to keep its gears lubed, belt’s tightened, and the bell’s ringing. This machine’s operating parameters are both intricate and precise, only needing to be wound every eight billion years or so.
As part of my all encompassing experience of the universe, I want to feel the raging, life and death giving heat of a trillion stars as they burn, flare, smolder, flicker, then die after sacrificing the last of their gaseous fire and light to the void. When the last spark is spent, only the vast coldness exists for billions of lightyears until one might feel the radiant warmth of another star. Like all of its kind, this star also ceaselessly spends itself pouring heat and light into the void. This younger star’s blistering heat might still be powerful enough to deliver total incinerating destruction to anything that draws too close. However, it also lends its light to the parasitic planets and moons that drift around it. These orbiting dependents benefit from the star’s light, heat, and gravitational stability. Still for all of its power, this star also burns towards an ending where it will eventually expel one final weak blast of warm and dimming ray of light into the cosmos.
As part of my glimpse of all that is, I want to see the birth and death of galaxies. I want to witness how seemingly random chemical and environmental processes come together in just the right quantities and under precise circumstances to create the first living cell on some new and cooling planet somewhere in the universe. I want to follow that cell and its dependents as they live, die, but somehow always change for the better with each new generation. I would like to see other newly born cells take on the challenge of life and change. From all of these cells I hope to see the strange and wonderful beauty of a flora and fauna that’s different from anything I have ever seen before. Most of all, I hope to be present for that moment after millions of generations and countless changes that the progeny of that one single cell becomes aware and has a thought.
As my voyeuristic peek at the universe comes to an end, I want to smell the ozone and the burning of carbon from the friction created when meteors collide as they drift through the universe. I want to breathe in the unique chemical heat of the friction that welds the two space rocks together to form an even bigger drifting form in space. I want to catch a whiff of the even more intense melting of the metals, carbons, rock, and remnants of organic compounds within those larger forms as they enter the orbit of a star. I want to smell the atmosphere on this new planet and hope that there is a beath of life somewhere within that harsh fragrant bouquet of melted rock, metal, and atoms.
That is what I want for Christmas, or a puppy. Whatever fits within your budget.