The picture that science presents to us is in some sense uncomfortable.

We evolved as Human beings a few million years ago on the Savana in Africa and we evolved to escape tigers, or lions, or predators, and so what makes common sense to us is a World on our scale?

You know how to throw a rock or a spear or how to find a cave and we didn’t evolve to understand quantum mechanics. And therefore it’s not too surprising that on scales vastly different than the kind experience we had as we were evolving as a species, that nature seems strange and sometimes almost unfathomable certainly violates our common sense – our sense of what is common sense in what is intuition.

But as I like to say the universe doesn’t care about our common sense. We have to force are ideas to conform to the evidence of reality rather the other way around. And if reality seem strange, that’s ok. In fact, that’s what makes science so wonderful. It expands our minds, because it forces us to accept possibilities which in advance, we may never have thought was possible.

I’ve said that scientists love mysteries and we do. That’s the reason, I’m a scientist because it’s the puzzles of the universe that make it so exciting. Now, it is true that we want to solve – resolve those and solve those puzzles, that’s part of the fun of doing science, is solving puzzles basically.

But each time we do, new questions arise. And I think for many of us, just as in our lives, the searching is often much more profound than the finding. It’s the searching for answers through life in some sense that make life worth living – if we had all the answers we could just sit back and stare at navels. And I think what makes the search so exciting is that the answers are so surprising.

What we’ve learned is that we are more insignificant than we could have ever imagined. You could get rid of us and all the galaxies and everything we see in the universe and it would be largely the same. So were insignificant on a scale that Copernicus never would have imagined. And in addition, it turns out the future is miserable.

So the two little lessons that I like to say, I like to give is first we’re insignificant and second the future is miserable. Now, you might think that should depress you, but I would argue that in fact it should embolden you, and provide you a different kind of consolation because if the universe doesn’t care about us and if we’re an accident in a remote corner of the universe in some sense it makes us more precious.

The meaning in our lives is provided by us; we provide our own meaning. And we are here by – by accidents. And we should enjoy our brief moment in the sun, we should make the most of our brief moment in the sun because this is all we have. And even if we’re so rare that were the only life forms in the universe which I doubt. That makes us in some sense while we’re more insignificant we’re more special.

We are endowed with a Consciousness again ask questions about the beginning of the universe and learn about the universe honest largest scales and experience everything that it means to be Human: music, art, literature, and science.

So for me it should be spiritually uplifting that we’re not created with the purpose by someone who – who takes care of us like a a mannequin or with strings determining everything we determined our future and that makes our future more precious.