Have you ever googled "The Observable Universe"? Try it.

There is a good enough article in wikipedia about the observable universe which, depending on your perspective, may inform you of what reality is or isn't.
For me, it is a distinct alert to how much faith we put in our ignorance.

So recently, science discovered an anomaly that made us realise we could not account for approximately 96% of the matter/energy we thought we considered in the universe. So we coined the terms dark matter and dark energy (literally, unknown matter/energy) to designate that which we now know we don't know. So then science has been fiddling with this unknown stuff and using it to try to explain more of the universe to us.

Here's a few ideas from that wiki page:

The observable universe is a spherical region of the universe comprising all matter that can be observed from Earth or its space-based telescopes and exploratory probes at the present time, because electromagnetic radiation from these objects has had time to reach the Solar System and Earth since the beginning of the cosmological expansion. There are at least 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Assuming the universe is isotropic, the distance to the edge of the observable universe is roughly the same in every direction. That is, the observable universe has a spherical volume (a ball) centered on the observer. Every location in the universe has its own observable universe, which may or may not overlap with the one centered on Earth.

The word observable in this sense does not refer to the capability of modern technology to detect light or other information from an object, or whether there is anything to be detected. It refers to the physical limit created by the speed of light itself. Because no signals can travel faster than light, any object farther away from us than light could travel in the age of the universe (estimated as of 2015 around 13.799 ± 0.021 billion years) simply cannot be detected, as the signals could not have reached us yet. Sometimes astrophysicists distinguish between the visible universe, which includes only signals emitted since recombination (when hydrogen atoms were formed from protons and electrons and photons were emitted)—and the observable universe, which includes signals since the beginning of the cosmological expansion (the Big Bang in traditional physical cosmology, the end of the inflationary epoch in modern cosmology).

According to calculations, the current comoving distance—proper distance, which takes into account that the universe has expanded since the light was emitted—to particles from which the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) was emitted, which represents the radius of the visible universe, is about 14.0 billion parsecs (about 45.7 billion light-years), while the comoving distance to the edge of the observable universe is about 14.3 billion parsecs (about 46.6 billion light-years),[10] about 2% larger. The radius of the observable universe is therefore estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years and its diameter about 28.5 gigaparsecs (93 billion light-years, 8.8×1026 metres or 2.89×1027 feet). The total mass of ordinary matter in the universe can be calculated using the critical density and the diameter of the observable universe to be about 1.5 × 1053 kg. In November 2018, astronomers reported that the extragalactic background light (EBL) amounted to 4 × 1084 photons. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

The universe versus the observable universe - It is plausible that the galaxies within our observable universe represent only a minuscule fraction of the galaxies in the universe. According to the theory of cosmic inflation initially introduced by its founder, Alan Guth (and by D. Kazanas), if it is assumed that inflation began about 10−37 seconds after the Big Bang, then with the plausible assumption that the size of the universe before the inflation occurred was approximately equal to the speed of light times its age, that would suggest that at present the entire universe's size is at least 3×1023 times the radius of the observable universe. There are also lower estimates claiming that the entire universe is in excess of 250 times larger (by volume, not by radius) than the observable universe and also higher estimates implying that the universe could have the size[clarification needed] of at least 10^10^10^122 Mpc. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

Now, supposing, like me, you tried to read up on galaxies, galaxy clusters and even galactic superclusters. Then you tried to develop some kind of perspective where you try to see if you can find yourself within the galactic supercluster some scientist thought I belonged to (Laniakea). I couldn't fathom my smallness, basically, I just lost it.

So, I tried to be rational. I asked myself if I would trust any prediction with a 4%-ish success rate. That is, according to the 4% that we think we know (though not everything about it. Actually, there's a lot about that 4% that we don't know about.) there's a probability that the universe began approx. 13 billion years ago, a probability that we're the only kind of lifeforms that can exist (i.e. carbon-based), a probability that delineating life is based solely on sense-derived values (since all calculations are based on observable light), etc, etc.

After such considerations, I PRAYED.

I think we owe life an apology, a constant beatitude of gratitude and, at the very least, a heart to heart prayer of goodwill to whatever its essence is. Don't you?



HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!