Wow! Such shallow topics to start off the new year with. Won't hardly even have to think about this one. Much. [/snark]

Okay, I'll start. Time. I guess the simplest way to understand it is that it is tied in with the expansion of space. As the universe expands, so does time. But remember, this is one of the ones that has the scientists blowing their brains out over, too. Does time advance in discrete increments? Does it flow seamlessly? CAN it move backwards? I suppose we can look at it like a drop of water running along a channel. The channel slopes down slightly, so the water moves. You cannot get the water to move backwards, up the channel, without adding energy to it, and right now we don't know of any way to reverse time. Will we? Can't say for sure. Probably not, but there is so much in the universe that's counter-intuitive that there's no way to say for sure.

So, death then. I agree with you, thir. Death simply means change. Stars don't literally die, since they don't have life. But they change, sometimes drastically, and become different. The bigger ones will explode, blowing off a lot of their mass, and collapse into white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes. The 'corpse' remains, but technically it may not be a star. Same with a planet. Is the moon dead? There's very little change going on there, except that which is imposed from outside. Is the Earth alive? It's teeming with life, and there is a lot of geologic activity, which is change as well. Hell, there are some organisms, like viri (viruses) that don't fit comfortably into our definitions of life. But death is definitely a change. On the personal level, our bodies decay, our consciousness fades out with the death of the brain. We gradually melt back into the chemical components of which we are made. But as you say, pieces of us remain through our descendants.

I would disagree that there must be more to us than our bodies. Everything we know (which I will grant is not everything there IS to know) says that when our bodies die, so do our minds. There's no evidence for anything which survives after death that could contain our consciousness, other than the molecules and atoms and energy which made us up to begin with. There is no evidence for a soul, in other words. Only wishful thinking. On the other hand, there are atoms within each of us that have been a part of other people in the past, going all the way back to the first stirrings of life on the planet. Hell, the atoms in our bodies were once part of stars, probably many different stars. As Carl Sagan once said, "We are star stuff." And the atoms which make up our bodies will someday be a part of someone else. So there is a kind of immortality after all. We just won't be aware of it. The 'I' of me, my consciousness, my mind, will end.

So, on to the universe. What started it? No one knows. Scientists can calculate the actions of the universe from the first milliseconds, even picoseconds, after the 'Big Bang' but there is no way, as yet, to determine what happened to initiate that expansion, or what came before it. Was there a 'before'? We just don't know. Scientists have observed pairs of particles being 'created' out of vacuum, basically popping into existence from nothing. The term, "Nature abhors a vacuum" seems to be quite literally true. As to where it will go, again, we can only speculate. The trend seems to be towards an eventual heat death, where all of the energy in the universe has fallen into its lowest state, and all of the matter has degenerated to the point where there are no more reactions going on. Everything is spread out and hovering at just above absolute zero. But if there are particles constantly popping into existence, perhaps they will renew the universe, keep it fresh, like replacing the air in a sealed room. Or perhaps, in some far, far distant future, all of the matter and energy which makes up our universe will all swirl together again, slowly building up to that massive singularity which will eventually become another big bang. Perhaps this cycle just repeats, over and over again, space literally expanding and contracting, recreating time and stars and galaxies and life all over again.

And that's about as philosophical as I ever want to get!