#hubert reeves

“Walking home at night, I shine my flashlight up at the sky. I send billions of … photons toward space. What is their destination? A tiny fraction will be absorbed by the air. An even smaller fraction will be intercepted by the surface of planets and stars. The vast majority … will plod on forever. After some thousands of years they will leave our galaxy; after some millions of years they will leave our supercluster. They will wander through an even emptier, even colder realm. The universe is transparent in the direction of the future." 

—Hubert Reeves, "Atoms of silence”