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From September 20-22, I went on a retreat at Lake Charlevoix in Michigan with my colleagues from the Michigan Society of Fellows. Thinkers and educators from all disciplines—incl. Astrophysics, A.I., Psychology, Anthropology, Performance, etc.—came together in the middle of nature to spend a few days on the water or on the grass. Highlight was sitting around a campfire and subsequently stargazing through a telescope that one of us brought. At the camp fire I met an astronomy student who was about to apply for Graduate School at UM and I asked her what motivated her to study the stars and she told me it was the discovery of so-called Dark Energy that kept her looking up. Just the day before, the astronomy professor who was with us told me that Dark Energy supported the theory that the expansion of the universe accelerates the bigger it gets until all will turn into a vast empty space. Rather than buying into this theory, I find comfort in an alternative theory about the universe, the so-called Big Bounce, which proclaims that once our universe has reached its maximum level of expansion, it will contract again, from where it will expand again, forming an ‘eternal pulse’. Looking at the stars and trying to gauge beyond the scale of human space, time, and identity is always an experience that is both grounding and transcendental. On the one hand, it reminds us, how confined our range of action and motion is, on the other hand, it shows us how much there is out there for us…