Creation Story for the 21st Century
(From an email to my granddaughter)
Other people know physics and biology much better than I do. This is what I understand from what I’ve read and heard and figured out from trying to make sense of all the pieces. This is what I think about how the universe came to be and where we fit in the overall scheme of things.
Imagine you have a huge bubble ring and lots of soapy water and all the time imaginable to blow bubbles. Most of your bubbles pop right away before they are fully formed. Lots come out small and pop soon. And a few get big and drift away and are beautiful.
You keep blowing bubbles for years, for billions of years and you can keep blowing them for billions of years in the future. You’re an absolutely amazing bubble blower.
Now imagine that instead of bubbles of soap, you are making bubbles of space-time, the stuff that makes the existence of all stuff possible. And one of your bubbles is a grand-prize winner. It keeps getting bigger and bigger. All the conditions are right this time. When you blow billions and billions of bubbles even something ridiculously unlikely will happen sooner or later — in all of eternity a once-in-a-million shot will happen many times.
This bubble lasts for 14 billion years and keeps expanding and might continue for billions of years to come. That bubble becomes the whole universe.
On the surface of that bubble, there form galaxies and stars and planets, billions and billions of them. And on one of those planets, life forms and evolves over three and a half billion years, from one-cell creatures to dogs and cats and monkeys and people.
Imagine that everything and everyone in this universe is connected to everyone and everything else. We’re all on that same ever-expanding bubble, and we’re connected by forces like gravity, and we’re connected by history as well.
When our big bubble started, all that existed were the simplest of atoms and molecules and particles. Over time, these little pieces of matter randomly came together by the push and pull of forces like electricity and gravity and formed stars. And the stars became so dense and so hot that new kinds of atoms and molecules formed inside them. And some of those stars got so big that they exploded as “super novas”. And in those explosions new more complex atoms and molecules were created — kinds of matter that are essential to life as we know it were formed in the explosion of stars.
In other words, the matter that makes up your body was created in the explosion of stars. You might say that stars died so that life as we know it could exist.
Space and time are vast, and we seem small and insignificant next to all that vastness. On the other hand, it took all that vastness of time and space for us to come into existence, for us to be who we are here and now.
In other words, the bigger the universe, the more important we are, because it took all of that to make us.
Then the question becomes — what should we do about it?
If we’re all that important, what should we do with our lives, with our effort and our thinking and our working together and our caring for and about one another to make the creation and evolution of the universe worth the effort?
