I favour something like this.
Another way of looking at the problem is to take a more holistic view of the universe and everything that it contains. Everything is made of the same original elementary forces that coalesced from the big bang singularity, whether it be a photon, a star, a lump of rock or a human being. It is only the combination, the mix of things, that makes things different from one another. When we peer millions of light years into the depths of space, we still see the same things, further back in time of course, as we find in our own galaxy and here on Earth. We, the human race, are as much a part of the universe as a spiral galaxy or black hole, and made of the same stuff. Is it then fanciful to suggest that we, as sentient beings examining the universe, represent the universe examining itself? because in a manner of speaking it is. We are not 'different' to the universe, we are very much an integral part of the universe as a whole, we may be only a very small part, but we are a part of it, we do not exist in isolation. So next time you look up at a dark sky and see those distant twinkling stars just remember that it was in those fiery furnaces that the first steps were taking in building up the atoms that eventually led to you. We are made of star dust, we are part of the universe.
