After its first light broke free, the cosmos was just hydrogen and helium gas cooling in the dark: astronomers call it the "dark ages". It took roughly 100 to 200 million years for gravity to gather enough gas and ignite the first stars. Huge and short-lived, they forged the first heavy elements.
A large share of Earth's water molecules formed in the interstellar cloud that existed before the Sun was even born, more than 4.6 billion years ago. You are literally drinking a cosmic fossil.
By day, the Martian sky looks butterscotch because of fine dust hanging in the air. But at dusk, those same grains scatter blue light forward, creating a bluish glow around the Sun. Rovers have photographed these blue sunsets: the exact reverse of what we see on Earth.