You Are as Remarkable as a Rusty Lump of Iron

This is what time looks like. All of it. 

Let me backtrack.

13.8 billion years ago, you were everything and nothing. Infinity and zero were the same number and they both equaled one. 
            One was the universe before there was a universe. One was the reason neither distance nor time existed. How can you measure the distance between two points when only one point exists? How can you measure the time it takes to get from Point A to Point B when there is no such thing as Point B?

Without time, it is impossible to say how long you were like this. Only that it was forever.

And then suddenly, there was a Big Bang and Forever turned into Now. Now was the moment that came after Infinity but before Eternity. Now was the relative position of Point A to Point B, Point C, Point D and every Point 10 to the nth power, all hurtling away from each other at astronomical speeds through the newly existent astronomy.

            This astronomy became the cosmos as distance became an actual thing. If a train leaves the station at midnight and travels 100 kilometers per hour, how far will it get in one day? One week? One year? 100 years? A million years? How far will it get in a billion years, while traveling ten million kilometers per hour?

From Oneness came Everythingness. 

All that matter, all that distance, spewing outward for half a million years before it cooled down enough to form the most rudimentary atoms. All those atoms traveling outward for a billion years more before some of them somehow found a way back to each, clustering together to form molecules, form clouds, form galaxies, stars and solar systems.

            And yet still, the matter that would become you kept hurtling outward, creating ever greater distances until finally, 9.2 billion years after leaving that train station on a seemingly endless journey, in an outer arm of an indistinct galaxy called The Milky Way (at least that's what it would be named in four or five billion years), some of that dust started clustering together. 

Particles that had been separated since the creation of Time marked the end of Forever found their way back to each other.

They formed a cloud then a nebula then a distinct yet unremarkable star that would one day be called, The Sun.

            Within the gravitational pull of this “Sun,” much dust remained and from ancient chaos came order as those dust particles found orbits around that star. They collided and clustered then collided again, only far more spectacularly, drawn together by the pull of their own infinitesimally small yet growing gravitational fields. In a short time (astronomically speaking of course), such particles in the same orbital path grew into planet-sized dust bunnies called, wait for it… Planets.

            Close to the Sun, There was Mercury and Venus, Earth and Mars. Eventually you would get to Jupiter (that is if you existed yet), but first there was a vaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast region (even by planetary distances), where there hadn't been enough matter to cluster into a planet, so instead smaller bodies had formed called, Asteroids. 

These asteroids formed 4.6 billion years ago, while the Earth’s core was still coalescing. 

Many of them would end up with the same iron-nickel composition as that core. A “belt” of asteroids that would be the worst belt ever, were it to try holding up some sort of galactic pair of pants, for though these bodies might range in size from a fingernail to a continent, due to the true vastness of this area, the average the distance between each of them would be a million kilometers in every direction or 75 Earths or two and a half times the distance Neil Armstrong traveled to get to the moon. 

            So much empty space between such tiny bodies, it's almost like they should call a place like this, wait for it… Space. 

And that's where the story ends. Or at least pauses for 4,600,000,000 years. 

In the meantime, Earth evolves, an atmosphere forms, then rain, then oceans, blah, blah, blah, then life, blah, blah, then you.

            In all that blah, blah, blah, those asteroids, made from the very particles of the Big Bang, remained unchanged. Well mostly unchanged. Because as we know not even Forever can last forever. 

            Occasionally, you see, there might be an impossibly unlikely collision or perhaps a gravitational disturbance that would send one of these asteroids out of its heretofore endless 4.6 billion year orbit. 

            Then there might be an impossibly unlikely crossing of the asteroid’s new trajectory with the orbital trajectory of a planet or moon. Out of all that empty space, they just happened to run into each other, two specs in the cosmos finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s impossibly unlikely x2.

            Impossibly unlikely x3 is that planet happening to be Earth, where the asteroid gets pulled into its gravitational field, enters the atmosphere and changes its name to Meteor.

            Impossibly unlikely x4 is the meteor being big enough that it doesn't vaporize from the friction of flying through said atmosphere, like so many “shooting stars.”

            Impossibly unlikely x5 is what is leftover of that meteor changing its name to Meteorite as it hits dry ground instead of the ocean, where, in a case of impossibly unlikely x6, it might be found by one of the You’s who now occupy the planet. 

            Finally, in an act of impossible unlikeliness x7, that You doesn’t try to melt it down into a sword or cannonball (well, they try with other ones but it doesn’t work) and instead they leave it so that another You, a future You, perhaps with a man-bun and a fedora, can come along and finally recognize this lump of tetanus as an artifact from Space, a relic of the Beginning of Time itself.

That’s a lot of unlikeliness. 

And yet here we are, the You that is me and the You that is you, looking with a sense of wonder at this rusty lump of iron that took 9.2 billion years to get around to forming, then spent 4.6 billion years floating around in a part of space 1,000x more distant than any astronaut has ever traveled. 

From the Big Bang to the present moment, sometimes an indistinct rock can contain all of time. And sometimes, with a little imagination and the right inspiration, a human being can behold that seemingly unremarkable stone and perceive the entire universe.