As this happens, our atmosphere will be blown out into the cosmos, and the atoms that now make up our bodies may be dispersed into the Interstellar medium, perhaps to seed some future planet around some star that has yet to be born.

The famous and romantic Golden Record , developed by Carl Sagan and his colleagues, with music and images from the world as it was in 1977, might be discovered one day by distant aliens who find the crafts wandering in their vicinity of the galaxy.

Even more inexplicable is the fact that 70 percent of the total energy of the cosmos resides mysteriously in empty space, which is causing the expansion of our universe to speed up, not slow down.

Even in our own solar system, we expected the moons of Jupiter and Saturn were merely dead lumps of rock or frozen snowballs, whereas we now understand that several have warm oceans underneath a coating of ice — ideal potential breeding grounds for what may be independent forms of life.

On smaller scales, we have unraveled the nature of three of the four fundamental forces of the universe and discovered the Higgs particle, validating our picture of the origin of mass in the cosmos.