According to the universally accepted scientific evidence the universe is around 13.7 billions years old. A number that humans can only barely understand. Given what we know now, it all began with one infinitely dense and infinitely small singularity that for reasons still not understood suddenly began to expand.
Well, more accurately I believe the space itself began expanding. I’ve just recently come to understand the term, “Big Bang” was coined by a critic of the theory. He still thought the most likely explanation of the universe was the “Steady State Theory.” That the universe had always existed, I’m still fuzzy on how the most basic building block of the universe, hydrogen was supposed to be replenished during these countless epochs. When you have gravity pulling the hydrogen together to form stars, which then spend millions to billions of years fusing it to make heavier elements you eventually would run out.
From what I understand, at the beginning the Big Bang universe was much too hot for actual atoms of hydrogen to form. You had a blizzard of subatomic particles churning around waiting for the temperature to cool. Once the universe did cool down basic hydrogen, and apparently a small amount of helium, formed with gravity beginning to pull it together to form stars and galaxies.
The first generation of stars were monsters in size. With no heavier elements to mediate fusion they lived hot and short lives. They fused hydrogen and helium into heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, and many others. When these first generation stars died they seeded the space around them with these heavier elements.
A couple of billion years later enough heavier elements have been created to produce the first terrestrial worlds. Although, the massive, short-lived stars that first produced the heavier elements still make up a significant portion of the stellar population.
But on some of these terrestrial worlds the conditions were just right to allow life to emerge. As time passed the life on some of these worlds evolved to become complex multicellular creatures. On yet a smaller number of these worlds intelligent life arose and driven by curiosity and need, built a technical civilization to make their lives better.
The problem many of these first alien civilizations had to contend with makes our existential fear seem small. During that era of a still young universe the number of the hot and short lived stars was much higher. Having a sufficiently large stellar neighbor go supernova, even several lightyears away, would sterilize any world in the path of the radiation shockwave.
Now imagine an alien civilization stumbling through its own version of the 20th century dealing with all the stunning advancements in science and knowledge of the universe. In our own world it wasn’t until 1929 that American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding. Not only that, but it was Hubble who came to understand that what were called “spiral nebulae” were actually galaxies and that they were “island universes.”
Not to get too deep in the weeds, but during the Steady State era of the universe it was accepted that the Milky Way galaxy was the universe.
It boggles the mind to think of early alien civilizations struggling to learn their place in the universe, only to discover that one of their massive stellar neighbors is about to go supernova. That all life, except what lives in the deepest, darkest regions of that world’s ocean, will be erased. That in just a few thousands years all the monuments created by that intelligent species will turn to dust, leaving no trace of who they were.
Never realized that the word “Oblivion” could be so terrifying.
For us humans, we’ve mapped our stellar neighborhood and we do not have any of those types of massive stars anywhere near us. There is the red supergiant star Betelgeuse, which is between 400 to 724 lightyears away. It will go supernova eventually but is out of our danger zone when it does. We’ll just get a fantastic light show anytime between now and one-hundred thousand years fin the future.
Enjoy the video from Cool Worlds, its where I got the idea for this post.
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3 comments:
The whole concept of how we came to be is just mindboggling. And also, the fact that mostly we don't worry about unmanmade cataclysms is also pretty amazing. I mean, the manmade terrors are enough, but still...
Interesting post to read this evening. I am up in West Virginia and spent the afternoon at the Green Bank Observatory, a huge radio telescope site. I was shocked that to get close to the telescopes, you had to turn your cell phones off, as they could interfere with the signals.
Hope you are doing better!! This is all beyond me It is such a mindboggling concept
Greeting from NZ
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