Scientific progress has accustomed us to the idea that nothing is impossible and everything is plausible, provided we can explain it.
So then: consider the thermodynamics of the entropic states of a universe — ours — according to which we might find ourselves, at some point, in a highly improbable state of equilibrium and random fluctuation; and alongside it the anthropic principle, by which, simplifying, the universe exists as long as there are self-aware observers to observe it. Out of the two comes the bizarre but perfectly coherent theory of Boltzmann brains.
Riding that beautiful paradox on an infinite improbability drive, I reckon that if those brains exist, they look like this.
What we are actually looking at
It is the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888), an emission nebula in Cygnus, produced by the violent outbursts of a Wolf-Rayet star: an enormous, furious star that has reached the stage of shedding its outer layers, hurling them into space at thousands of kilometres per second.
Two shock fronts are visible, born from the collision between the ejected matter and the interstellar medium: the outer one, mostly ionized oxygen, and the inner violet one, hydrogen and oxygen together.
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