Now, whenever we feel bad, we open Instagram and watch garbage instead of simply allowing ourselves to stay sad. Then we go to sleep feeling even more irritated and exhausted, and slowly lose our minds.

Even behind something as simple as a snap of the fingers lie the incomprehensible facts of a universe that has been forming and evolving for 14 billion years.

Nature does not recognize the idea of an organism being created “by chance.” Mathematics, physics — everything that exists or happens — follows processes with causes and underlying principles. Nothing happens without a reason.

An ant does not know that its existence helps regulate an ecosystem. Humans are much the same.

Humanity itself is simply a small collective — a collective that needed roughly 300,000 years to create something like an iPhone, yet one that continues moving toward much greater goals, perhaps toward purposes that the universe itself needs.

We already know that the significance of an object or living organism is not determined by its size or mass.

So, in a sense, the smallest particles literally make up the material universe — the universe stretching across 93 billion light-years, and perhaps far beyond.

And yet, it is “just” a quark, a tiny particle lost somewhere in the universe.

Quarks make up protons and neutrons. Now, imagine that quarks did not exist in nature. That would mean there were no protons or neutrons, and so on. What would happen? Reality as we know it would collapse in an instant. There would be nothing at all.

Do you understand just how incredibly small a quark is?

In that case, Earth itself would stretch across a distance of 1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 light-years (a decillion light-years).

Although a quark does not have a clearly defined physical size, let’s imagine, approximately, that the quark and Earth began growing simultaneously, and that this growth stopped when the quark’s size approached the size of Earth.

To understand this, let’s look at a quark in the quantum world — one of the smallest things we know of.

The Kremlin does not want a 45-million-strong Russia-hating Slavic nation on its doorstep to be hostile, even though many of us do not like it. Russia will do everything it can to Belarusianize Ukraine