One of the things that most puzzles me, is the existence of human beings. Thinking about this for the first time, triggered an existential crisis when I was in the seventh grade. As a thoroughly devoted disciple of television documentaries, it bothered me that in my normal life -- at school, at home -- no one talked about space, and human evolution, and extraterrestrial beings, and all these other strange and bizarre things about the universe.
For the sake of keeping polite company, I learned to keep these thoughts to myself. But I never stopped wondering: How did we come to be here, on Earth? How did life, and even more mind-bogglingly, intelligent life arise on Earth? Are we alone? In the entire universe, could we be completely alone? What lies beyond the reaches of space we can't see? What about dark matter and dark energy? How is it that everything we see, in the unfathomably vast night sky, is just four percent of the total matter in the universe? These questions kept me up at night, and started to fill the very first sentences of what would become my first draft.
I never got to study astrophysics at any advanced level because of my most fatal limitation: I am absolutely terrible at mathematics. After my required university calculus class, I resigned myself to a life studying the utterly mundane. So any opinions expressed are not those of a scientist (I wish they were), but of a stubbornly curious individual, taking a hiatus from the daily rigors of the inconsequential.
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