The chapter opens with a sweeping “cosmic calendar” that compresses the universe’s history into a single year: the Big Bang at January 1, galaxies and the Milky Way forming, the sun and Earth emerging in late summer, and life arriving by mid-September. Multicellular life, plants, dinosaurs, and then humans appear only at the very end of the year, making human civilisation a near-instant in cosmic time.

The narration pushes past the calendar’s midnight to stress that time continues with indifference, imagining distant futures in which humans are replaced by radically transformed postbeings. It then lists plausible cosmic hazards and the far inevitability of the sun’s expansion, when Earth could be scorched, emptied of oceans, and ultimately consumed as the solar system’s dynamics decay.

Against this vast, uncaring scale, the universe is framed as endless drift and collision, where everything humans do becomes a momentary light remembered by nothing. The present is described as a brief, intense bloom of life and consciousness that is already passing.

Late in their own small slice of time, the six crew wake disoriented from their post-film sleep, hours past the scheduled bedtime. Half-joking about mission control’s cameras being off at night, they suddenly feel the strangeness of their lives and find themselves facing one another as if reunited.

Without discussion, they float inward and interlink in a twelve-armed embrace, exchanging goodnights in their different languages and sharing small gestures of affection. They then push apart; someone takes a brief look outside at bright daylight over Florida, and each astronaut heads to their quarters as the station’s hum settles them back into sleep.