The Story of the Universe: Part 2

By the time evolution brought forth a species called Homo Sapiens, on an undistinctive planet called Earth, the universe had already existed for over ten billion (10,000,000,000) years. This species spent most of the next 600,000 years eeking out a meager existence, battling with the other cohabitants of the planet for mere survival, but eventually, after most of that 600,000 years had passed, they briefly gained the upper hand over all other species of the Earth and managed to dominate them in spectacularly successful and brutal fashion.

Compared with the eons that had preceeded it, at only a handful of millenia, the reign of Homo Sapiens was pitifully short, and despite the enormous amount of energy and enthusiasm they collectively dedicated to making an impression on the universe, in the end the existence of Homo Sapiens amounted more or less to nothing at all.

Following their demise, the ecology of Earth gradually regained its balance and evolution continued to bring forth a widely varied array of organisms for a further 2 billion years. None of these organisms happened to possess the same level of intelligence Homo Sapiens had, and no-one noticed, or was by any means the worse-off for it. Eventually the Sun, the star around which the Earth had been orbiting for six and a half billion years, began to exhaust its reserves of hydrogen, and as this was taking place the concentration of helium at its core rose, causing in turn a dramatic increase in its production of heat and light. On Earth this caused a runaway greenhouse effect, by consequence of which all the oceans evaporated, and practically all life became extinct. In this sterile environment only thermophilic bacteria were able to cling to life, but after a time even these hardy organisms were extinguished as the Sun continued to swell.

Once all the helium at the Sun's core had been completely extinguished it became a red giant, loosing much of its mass to evaporation in the process, which caused the planets, including Earth to slip into more remote orbits. The Sun continued to grow and at its largest, was 100 times its earlier size. At this time the surface of the Earth was completely molten. Eventually the Sun exploded into a planetary nebula, which, had there been any sentient life forms around to observe it, would have appeared quite picturesque. After this the Sun assumed it's penultimate form of a white dwarf and subsequently, very very slowly, faded to black.

100 trillion (10 to the power of 14) years after the extinction of Homo Sapiens, all the stars in the universe had exhausted their fuel supply, and the only remaining objects were dead stars in the form of brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. The protons that formed the atoms from which the matter of these dead stars were composed then started decaying. For another 10 trillion, trillion (10 to the power of 25) years, the only thing that happened in the universe was the unbelievably slow, inexorable decay of dead stars.

Eventually this process too, was complete and the only things left in the universe were black holes. The black holes also decayed, even more slowly than the dead stars. The decay of black holes took place over such an unimaginably huge span of time that words do not exist to describe the amount of years it took, we can only use numbers: After 10 to the power of 100 years, all the black holes in the universe had evaporated, and there was nothing remaining in the entire cold, dark expanse except the occasional stray, lonely photon, neutrino, electron or positron, flying about in meaningless, random patterns, hardly ever encountering one another, forever .....

The Story of the Universe: Part 1

In the beginning there was incredible heat, heat that was so unbelievably hot that atoms could not exist. Heat that was so intense that even protons and neutrons - the particles that make up atoms - could not exist.

The things that are smaller than protons and neutrons - called "quarks" - were the only things, at the beginning. There were quarks that were made of matter and quarks that were made of antimatter, in almost equal parts. For every thirty million antimatter quarks there were thirty million and one matter quarks. The matter and antimatter annihilated each other. The almost statistically insignificant prevalence of matter over antimatter led to the emergence of a universe made of matter.

At this stage the universe was thirty microseconds (.000030 of 1 second) old. By this time the remaining matter quarks began condensing into protons and neutrons. While the protons and neutrons were assembling themselves, the universe was expanding, very very quickly. It started from a single point and became truly, stupendously enormous within just a fraction of a second.

When the universe was 1 second old, nuclear fusion reactions began fusing the protons and neutrons into light nuclei such as helium, deuterium and lithium. By this time the temperature had dropped to only ten billion degrees kelvin (9,999,999,727 degrees celsius). Creation of light nuclei continued for about three minutes, after which continued expansion cooled the universe to about one billion degrees kelvin and the epoch of nucleosynthesis came to an end.

For the next few eons the universe didn't do anything much except continue expanding and cooling. It was still very hot and very bright. After about 300,000 years it had cooled to an average temperature of about 3000 degrees kelvin (2,726.85 celsius) and atoms were able to form. Some areas of the universe were slightly denser than others in their atom populations, and this density caused these first hydrogen and helium atoms to fall under the influence of gravity and start forming massive aggregations of gas, which much later became known as galaxies.

Within these aggregations, there were some even more dense aggregations, which were drawn together by gravity to become stars.

Nearly 9 billion years after the universe began, a star which later became known as "The Sun" formed, and during its formation a number of solid and gaseous objects also formed in orbit around it. Some of these objects were large enough to be classified as Planets. Some 1.2 billion years after the formation of the planets, random chemical reactions on one of them, which later became known as "Earth", caused the formation of amino acids. These amino acids in turn formed proteins. A random product of this process was ribonucleic acid (RNA). This substance had the property of being able to encode a sequence of proteins, and was also able to duplicate itself. With the formation of proteins and RNA, a new form of chemistry emerged on Earth, known as life.

With the process of protein sequence encoding and duplication, there also came a new phenomenon known as evolution. This process pitted organisms against randomly mutated replicas of themselves in a never-ending struggle for survival. If a mutation possessed qualities that provided itself and its offspring with improved survival prospects, that mutation would take hold and the original organism would die off.

For the next several billion years the process of evolution brought about life forms with increasingly complex structures, and after about 3.1 billion years, a new and highly complex kind of organism emerged, known as "animals". These first, incredibly complex animals were flatworms, jelly fish and algae. Impressive though these organisms were, evolution was not done yet. It continued to arrange animals into more and more complex structures until only 500 million years later "Mammals" began to appear. One hundred million, four hundred thousand years later, evolution created a mammal that was able to combine a large and complex brain with an ability to stand on its hind legs and use its opposable thumb and forefinger to manipulate objects. This mammal became known as "Homo Sapiens", and its unique survival technique was the ability to utilise its intelligence and manual dexterity to fashion and utilise "tools".

A further consequence of this intelligence was the propensity (among some of the species) to contemplate the universe and their place within it. This contemplation produced the mistaken conclusion (or philosophy) that life and intelligence are important and significant qualities and further, that the universe was created specifically in order to provide a habitat for things that possessed these qualities.

Homo Sapiens spent the next 600,000 years labouring under this misconception, and improving their tools. In the process they discovered electricity, which greatly enhanced the scope of their tools. Eventually they built electronic tools with the ability to perform simple calculations. These tools themselves evolved and became more complex, eventually evolving into more general information processing machines known as computers. Shortly thereafter, the advent of miniaturisation allowed computers to become small and inexpensive enough to be possessed by a great many of the Homo Sapiens, whereupon an international electronic communications network, known as the "internet", developed.

After only a decade or so of popular internet usage, a new pastime evolved whereupon bored Homo Sapiens with too much time on their hands would share whatever facile thoughts they happened to be experiencing, with other users of the internet utilising communications interfaces known as Web Logs, or "Blogs". Within only a couple of years over 7 million blogs had appeared, testifying to the vast amount of time Homo Sapiens had on their hands. Some of these blogs contained interesting information, the vast majority didn't, but one almost universally adopted theme discussed in these blogs was the unique specialness and inherent value of the Homo Sapiens species; supported by their achievements in social, technical, artistic and other fields.

Despite the absolute lack of impact intelligence, or even life could be observed to have had on the universe; despite the lack of evidence that life or intelligence had even emerged on any other planet in the universe, the Homo Sapiens still harboured a belief that intelligence and life were in some way important and significant properties.

Homo Sapiens flourished on the Earth for a brief flyspeck of time, and the impact they made on the universe was so infinitesimally tiny as to be statistically negligible.