Consider for a moment the destruction of a populated world. Consider the dread of its inhabitants as a massive cataclysmic force bears down upon them from the sky and strikes the ground, sending flame and debris all over the surface as it plows into the core. Landmasses split apart. Oceans boil. All the wonders and achievements of civilization are thrown down and scattered to the winds as the sky itself is stripped away.

Think of the kind of force it would take to completely shatter a world to its core. Then consider how this world’s debris would scatter throughout its system, with some pieces possibly managing to make it beyond the galaxy itself.

One piece – perhaps a remnant of this world’s society – might find its way to another inhabited world only to burn up in its atmosphere, scattering alien matter thoroughout the sky as an aerosol to someday to be recycled into that world’s systems. The matter transforms from stone to disparate minerals in the soil to a tree bearing fruit.

Consider that such an event may have occurred hundreds of millennia in the past, and that such a fragment reached our world.

So next time you drink your morning orange juice, it might have once the been the aerosolized remnants of some other world that exploded millennia ago. Maybe a child’s name had once been carved into it. You’re drinking the memory of someone’s childhood who died long before your world was ever more than dust drifting in the cosmos. Someone at some point knew that child’s name, but it is now as forgotten as the world from whence it came.

Anyway, hope you have a good day now.

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