Genesis as told by science
The complete story of how everything came to be, from the Big Bang to the rise of the first civilizations
Where did we come from? Who are we? How did we get here? And where are we heading? Questions as old as humanity itself, asked when man first opened his eyes into this mysterious world, observing in wonder and awe all the natural phenomenons around us, and most importantly observing ourselves. It’s like opening your eyes inside a dark box, you start feeling your way around, discovering its corners and walls, then start climbing those walls reaching the led, only to open it to discover your position in a vast endless world.
Mythologies were spun trying to answer those questions in times when we lacked the proper tools and reasoning to make such an attempt. Each civilization had its own creation myth, our existence became thousands of realities, warring to establish the one true story. All of this happening while the Earth is orbiting the Sun in the vastness of empty space. Reality doesn’t care what you believe, no matter how hard you do.
This is the story of us from the nothingness to the rise of the first civilization. Told based on scientific facts, which means, it is fact checked, peer reviewed and substantiated with heaps of empirical evidence. This subject will be dealt with in multiple series of articles, presented chronologically in a timeline fashion, with a very simple day to day language. You can actually use it as a bedtime story for you or for your kids, yes it can make you fall asleep.
Our story began 13.8 billion years ago with an infinitely small, dense, hot and energetic universe. It underwent an inflation, a rapid exponential expansion, in less than one second the volume of the Universe increased by a factor of 10 to the power of 37. It didn’t bang, and it wasn’t big, it stretched instead, yet it is called the Big Bang, weird ha?!!!
What do we mean with a stretch? Well, the space between the planets, stars and galaxies is not nothingness, rather it is something that stretches just like a rubber band. You can imagine the way the galaxies are drifting apart from each other like black dots on the surface of a balloon, as you blow into it, it’s surface stretches more and more pushing the dots apart. This actually applies to the space between the atoms of our bodies, so naturally our bodies should be stretching too and breaking into its constituents atoms, the reason we are not a stretched bag of meat is the force of attraction (electromagnetism) that pulls our bodies’ molecules together.
Back to our story. We are less than one second after the Big Bang, as the Universe stretches it starts cooling down, the one fundamental force starts to separate into the 4 forces of nature:
- Gravity: it is what causes the apple to fall, planets, stars and galaxies to form, and planets to orbit.
- Electromagnetic force: it causes light, electricity, heat, magnetism and chemistry.
- Strong nuclear force: causes the atom nuclei to form by binding protons together.
- Weak nuclear force: causes radioactivity decay, and nuclear fusion (what causes the Sun to burn).
The Universe continues to cool down, allowing the first matter to form from energy (matter and energy are the same thing, you can think of them like ice and liquid water) those particles are called Quarks. Then, the strong force started playing its role, binding the quarks together to form protons and neutrons. The second type of matter particles “Electrons” start forming shortly after.
3 minutes after the Big Bang. Temperatures continue to fall to the point that allowed the formation of the first atomic nuclei; protons and neutrons start to combine by the strong nuclear force, forming the positively charged atom nucleus.
400,000 years have passed. Hydrogen and Helium atoms start to form as the density of the Universe falls. The positively charged nucleus traps the negatively charged electrons due to the electromagnetic force, forming the first neutral atoms. By now the Universe consists of almost 80% hydrogen and 20% helium and nothing more. This process freed photons from interacting with electrons and protons, thus they became free to travel, turning the universe transparent for the first time and creating the Cosmic Microwave Background Image which was taken by the WMAP satellite in 2012.
50 million years after the Big Bang, gravity starts working its magic, the first stars are born as small lumps of Hydrogen gas gets bigger and bigger gathering more gas just like a snow ball, once the ball of gas reaches a critical mass the hydrogen atoms at the core start to merge creating heavier atoms and releasing photons, voila….first light, stars begin to shine in the darkness of space, like light bulbs switched on one by one.
1 billion years have passed. Galaxies and other large structures start to form by pulling stars into groups due to the gravitational force. New elements, never existed before are being formed and introduced into the Universe as they are being created inside the stars; carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, iron, the very atoms that forms you. Yes, every single atom in your body was cooked inside the furnace of a star which has exploded in a splendid supernova, spelling it’s guts into space which in turn will end up creating life. In a sense, the stars had to die in order for us to live.
The universe is 9 billion years old, the solar system starts to form, a gas cloud created by dead stars gains critical mass and starts collapsing creating the Sun out of Hydrogen, while other heavier elements begin to collapse into disks of dust around the Sun. 5 billion years later, one of those disks turns into our planet, Earth.
In the next article I will pick up from where we left and cover the development of the solar system, Earth and emergence of the first life form.
