It was a last-minute night out.

We decided to go star gazing, almost on a whim, joining an astronomy society on Greenwich Hill, London to watch a meteor shower. There was something wonderfully ordinary about the beginning of it. We had simply decided to go outside at night and look upwards. We had no idea that, for a few hours, the scale of our lives was about to change.

Laying down on Greenwich Hill beneath the darkness, surrounded by people who knew far more about the sky than I did, I waited. Then a meteor went by.

And suddenly the planet felt small.

It is difficult to describe what happens when you actually see something move across the night sky. Photographs of space had never quite prepared me for the experience of witnessing it with my own eyes. A meteor is there, and then it isn’t. A brief streak of light, travelling across an expanse so enormous that the human mind cannot really hold it. And then you look around at the people standing beside you, at the city below, at the lives everyone will return to tomorrow, and something inside you quietly recalibrates.

We are a tiny dot in the universe.

All of our supposedly enormous problems are happening on one small planet, orbiting one ordinary star, inside one galaxy among an almost incomprehensible number of galaxies. We spend our days worrying about emails, money, relationships, careers, deadlines, conversations we wish we had handled differently, things that happened yesterday and things that might happen tomorrow. They are real. They matter to us. But underneath all of that is this staggering fact: there are planets out there. Stars. Entire systems. Distances so vast that we struggle even to describe them properly.

And we have barely begun to reach beyond our own small corner of it.

That night we also saw Saturn.

There is something almost unsettling about seeing a planet through a telescope and realising that it is not an image on a screen. It is actually there. Somewhere in that enormous darkness, another world is existing whether or not humanity is looking at it. Saturn, with its rings, suddenly became something more than an object I had seen in textbooks and science-fiction films. For a moment, the distance between imagination and reality became very thin.

Perhaps that is why I have always loved science fiction so much. Interstellar is my favourite film of all time. The Orville is my favourite television show. I love Star Trek. I have always been fascinated by stories that ask what happens when humanity stops treating the boundaries of our current technology as the boundaries of what is possible. Interstellar travel feels impossibly distant to us now, and yet I cannot quite believe that it will remain impossible forever. I believe that one day humanity will travel between worlds.

Perhaps I am drawn to those stories because they make the universe feel less like an empty backdrop and more like an invitation.

There is something philosophical about looking at the stars long enough. The universe can begin to feel almost alive, not necessarily in the sense that every planet or star possesses consciousness, but in the sense that existence itself suddenly feels enormous and active and mysterious. We are conscious beings looking out at a universe we are part of, trying to understand the thing that contains us. The strangest part may be that the universe exists outside us, yet an entire representation of it can also exist inside a human mind.

We can think about galaxies we have never visited. We can imagine planets we will never see. We can invent spacecraft that do not yet exist and write stories about civilisations that may never have existed at all. Somehow, a tiny piece of matter on one small planet has become conscious enough to wonder what the rest of reality is doing.

That thought stays with me.

Sometimes I imagine the scale in reverse. A microscopic cell against the largest star I can comprehend. The comparison is almost laughable. We are unimaginably small. And yet we are made from the same fundamental physical ingredients that make up the universe around us. The atoms in our bodies belong to the same universe as the atoms inside stars. Some of the heavier elements that make up our world were forged through stellar processes long before Earth existed. We are not separate from the cosmos, looking in from the outside. We are part of it, temporarily arranged into human beings who can look upwards and ask questions.

Perhaps that is why moments like this can make human problems melt away.

Not because our problems are meaningless, but because perspective is sometimes a form of relief. A difficult conversation, an uncertain future, an embarrassing mistake, a worry that has occupied the entire day can suddenly become very quiet when you remember that Saturn is out there. That other worlds exist. That there are stars whose light has travelled extraordinary distances before reaching our eyes. That there are entire regions of the universe beyond our current ability to visit, and perhaps beyond our current ability to fully comprehend.

Laying down on Greenwich Hill, watching meteors pass overhead and seeing Saturn through a telescope, I felt both incredibly insignificant and strangely important.

Insignificant because humanity is so small.

Important because humanity is capable of wondering about it.

Maybe that is one of the most extraordinary things about consciousness. The universe is vast enough to contain things we cannot fathom, yet somehow it has produced minds capable of trying.

One day, perhaps, someone will stand somewhere far beyond Earth and look back at our planet through a telescope.

I want to live in that universe.