For some reason, whenever I spend time at night outside stargazing, I find myself thinking about how timeless the experience is. How I could be anywhere on the Earth and still probably be able to see at least some of the same stars up above me in the night sky. It’s a beautiful and humbling thought, but as much as the starlight itself often takes years to reach the Earth, so too I find myself thinking in those moments about how in years to come, I may well be able to see the same old sight. Yet then, in ten or twenty years when, if I’m lucky enough to be a parent, I might be sitting out on a hillside somewhere looking up in the night sky with my kid or kids, I’ll be seeing light that might well have left those stars at the time I’m writing this now.

The whole concept of light years, that the light of distant stars takes years to travel to Earth, and that one can measure distance in light years, is such a neat way to understand things, let alone a beautiful correspondence between space and time, in what tends to now be called spacetime. One of my favorite stars, Vega, is 25 light years away, meaning the light from Vega that I saw that night recently overlooking the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument left that star when I was 3 years old, right at the beginning of my consistent memories. Like a postcard stuck in a long delivery loop, a postcard sent in 1996, that light which glowed from Vega’s face reached my vision as a memory of a time now seeming well past.

When the light glowing from Vega’s surface today, in 2021, is seen by stargazers here on Earth, in 2046, I will be 54, living a life built on the memories of 2021, just as much as it will be on the more distant echoes of 1996, yet I’ll be as much the same person yet still very different from who I am today. Who knows what thoughts and context will go through my mind then, ideas that will be descendants of those that crossed my mind a few weeks ago when I sat back in the high desert and stared up at Vega well into the night.