Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff.

When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time with my father. We'd go outdoors and just spend time looking up at the stars at night. And though he didn't have a background in astronomy, he'd explain what he knew, and we just talk about the complexity of the universe. It really shaped me so that I almost, after I finished my

undergraduate degree, thought about going on and getting my PhD in astrophysics. And to this

day I keep up on in an armchair sort of way what's happening

in the world of physics, astronomy, and mathematics. So in this podcast I want us to go outdoors and talk about the universe and how the

universe in our place in it can help us find happiness. Well first off how big is our universe. If we look back in

time to the beginning of the universe called the Big Bang, it goes back to about

13.6 or 13.7 billion light years ago.

And light travels at 186,000 miles per second or 300,000 miles per second, or 300,000 kilometers per second.

And that is light traveling around the Earth

seven times in one second.

So it's really fast, and we're talking about not seconds, but billions of light years a very long time.

So it's vast and in this vastness there are galaxies and each galaxy holds around a hundred to 200 billion

suns and there are visibly about a hundred to two hundred billion other galaxies out there.

So it's huge and it's vast and it's big.

And what I think is utterly astounding is that we as human beings, we are aware of that.

We can actually look at and not understand, but we can understand how big and vast our universe is and our consciousness says

we're aware. We in some level understand that we're part of this vast universe and yet we only remember

this very short lifetime.

On one side is the vastness of the universe billions of years long and our awareness of that,

our understanding of that, and on the other side is our very short lifetime and yet they're juxtapose

they're right next to each other and I think if we can go outside tonight and

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