Take a moment to think about the size of the universe into which we’ve had the good fortune of being born.

Christopher Hitchens, the writer and orator, summed it up beautifully in the opening sentence of a speech he made in 2011. At the time, cancer had taken hold of his body – he knew he was in his final months of life.

For a few milliseconds of cosmic time, our species has lived on one very very small rock, in a very small solar system that’s a part of a fantastically unimportant suburb in one of an uncountable number of galaxies.

– Christopher Hitchens