One Less God — A Study of Creation, Evolution and Extinction
Chapter One: Creation
Nothingness. Try to imagine it. Close your eyes and imagine the deepest black, and pure silence. A place where absolutely nothing exists, not even the “place.” There appears to be nothing.
And there is nothing. Nothing at all.
Certainly not any atoms, elements, stars, and definitely not any planets or galaxies. Those will all come at a later time. But right now, there isn’t even time. There is only a singularity.
At this stage, whatever little singularity exists is extremely hot and dense. Energy would manifest itself into particles which would come in and out of existence for extremely short periods of time — these are called gluons. From gluons, pairs of quarks were created and usually destroyed each other, but not before creating even more gluons. These gluons found other quarks to interact with, copying and multiplying, forming new pairs of quarks and even more gluons. Quarks were converted to energy, and started to form new particles — hadrons, protons and neutrons. It was so hot that matter and energy were essentially the same. The temperature at this point is estimated to be around 10 billion degrees Celsius.
All of this took place in the first second of the creation of the universe, and paved the way for what is called the Nucleosynthesis Era. This is when the universe expanded to roughly one hundred billion kilometers — the rate of expansion allowing for it to cool considerably. And once things had cooled down, most of the neutrons were able to decay and form into protons, leading the way for the first atom — hydrogen.
With the creation of the first atom, began the Opaque Era (or the “Dark Era”, because during this period, hydrogen didn’t allow visible light to move around, and there were of course, still no stars) where atoms were formed out of hadrons and electrons. At this point, there are two main atoms — hydrogen and helium. They are to this day, the most abundant atoms found across the universe.
It would take a few million years for the hydrogen and helium atoms to gather together, and under the immense pressure of gravity, could finally fuse, eventually allowing stars and galaxies to form. The radiation emitted dissolved the hydrogen gas into plasma, which is still found all throughout the universe. The hydrogen plasma allowed for photons to pass and finally, there was light.
New variations in the primordial universe, as well as rapid expansion, resulted in the slow yet steady creation of stars, planets, and eventually galaxies.
Billions and billions of galaxies.
The universe as we know it, is approximately 13.8 billion years old. As to how the age of the universe was determined, a variety of measurements were used. First, measuring the speeds and distances of galaxies. Since the universe is still expanding, it allows us to calculate the time it must have taken for galaxies to reach their current locations, based on their previous locations. The second form of measurement is to measure the oldest known star clusters. Globular star clusters found orbiting the Milky Way galaxy have been measured to be around 13 billion years old.
Telescopes are time machines. When you are looking into deep space through an extremely powerful observatory — such as the Mauna Kea telescope (Hawaii) or the VLT (Chile) — you are actually looking back in time. For example, when observing our neighboring galaxy Andromeda (which is 2.537 million light years away) we are actually seeing how Andromeda looked 2.537 million years ago — as that’s how long it takes the light from Andromeda to reach us. It’s also interesting to think that the light we are looking at could be just that — light. The galaxy we are looking at with a distance of say, 5.2 billion years may not even exist anymore. And that leads to another interesting thought: depending on where one looks from, Earth may not even exist anymore, or at the opposite end of the spectrum, may not have even been formed yet.
Even the sunlight we see every day is 8 minutes old, as that’s how long the light from the Sun takes to reach us here on Earth.
The Hubble telescope has been in service for nearly 20 years now, and is nearing the end of its life cycle. It will be replaced by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is set to launch in October 2018. While the Hubble telescope observed the visible light range, the Giant Webb telescope will focus on the infrared light range, providing us with seven times more detail than the Hubble telescope. We can expect the first images from the Giant Webb telescope to reach us in March of 2019.
A common misconception is that Galileo Galilei invented the first telescope, when it was in fact a Dutch eyeglass maker, Hans Lippershey, who filed for a patent in 1608. Lippershey claimed that his telescope could magnify an object three times. However, very shortly afterwards, in 1609, Galileo — without ever having seen the designs by Lippershey — created his own telescope, which could magnify objects not three times, but by a factor of 20. Both are equally important — however, Galileo was the first man to point his telescope to the stars, and really started to observe and understand the Solar System.
And just as a side note — the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are currently racing towards each other at 402,000 km’s per hour. The two galaxies will eventually collide and merge in about 4 billion years. The merging of the two will take approximately a billion years, and will form a giant elliptical galaxy. The sheer size of these two galaxies means that individual stars and planets aren’t likely to collide, as the distances between them are so vast. So the merging wouldn’t be fatal to any life forms. However, the night sky in a billion years time from now would be absolutely jaw dropping — imagine looking up and seeing the Andromeda galaxy in its full glory just as easily as you could see the moon.
But this hardly matters for us humans, as in roughly one billion years, the Sun will become so hot that life on Earth will be impossible. Approximately 4 billion years later, the Sun will have used up all its fuel (in this case, hydrogen), and will die, becoming a White Dwarf. This will mark the end of all life in our Solar System.
The process for stars, planets and galaxies to form takes a very long time, longer than what most people can comprehend. For us humans, 100 years is a long time. But it really isn’t. And when compared to cosmic time, it’s literally nothing. Stars and galaxies take millions of years to form. It takes millions of years for the required atoms and dust particles to be weaved and fused together by gravity, which is the process of creating stars, planets, and eventually galaxies.
Most people would have an easier time understanding how all these processes worked if they could observe them in real time, but that of course is not a possibility. When not having the option to see say, a planet form from just dust particles and various elements before one’s very eyes, it’s easy to dismiss the entire process as false and just say that a higher entity, such as a god, just made it so.
That however, is a very weak argument. It’s incredibly lazy. It requires absolutely no thought. Instead of researching and trying to understand how things really work, I find it unsettling that most people in the world would rather just choose to believe what was written in books thousands of years ago, and does not provide any actual facts. Where is the sense of wonder and discovery? Why don’t more people wonder how things really work? It’s a simple question with a simple answer.
In the past, human beings just didn’t know any better. They couldn’t have known certain things, it just wasn’t possible to understand them back then. Imagine being in an ancient tribe 10,000 years ago and seeing a comet drifting across the night sky. They would have had no way to know what it actually was, so they just made up stories about them — usually they were seen as bad omens. If you were to tell them that they were actually frozen gases composed of carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia, and that as the comet approached the sun, the solar radiation would cause the surface of the comet to melt, creating its signature tail — they would have just looked at you and asked what carbon dioxide was. They couldn’t have known.
And I am in no way blaming them for that. If I had lived in the year 793 in Sweden, I would have probably sided with Odin. But times have certainly changed, and we know so much more about everything now, not just the cosmos. Medicine, physics, psychology — you name it, we have made massive advancements in almost every field. So how is it that all of this scientific progress can be so blatantly ignored? There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat, and they’re serious about it, too. They actually meet up and have conventions. It’s equal parts amusing and terrifying at the same time.
2000 years ago, people simply had no way of knowing certain things. Our ancestors were able to see the moon, the sun, the asteroid belt, and hundreds of thousands of stars. We didn’t even have any idea whatsoever that there were more galaxies than the Milky Way — Edwin Hubble identified Andromeda as a galaxy in 1925, just 93 years ago. Until that time, we thought that the entire universe was composed of the Milky Way. Just us. Turns out that our galaxy was not the only one, and that our neighboring galaxy — the one closest to us — is 2.537 million light years away. So that means reaching the nearest galaxy from the Milky Way would take us around two and a half million years, while traveling at the speed of light, a speed deemed by physics to be, quite frankly, impossible.
When the revelation came in 1925, it completely changed everything. The way we think about the Milky Way, planets, stars, and even life as a whole. It completely shattered our perception that we could be the only forms of intelligent life in the universe. We were not the only galaxy. We were just another galaxy — quite a small one at that — floating in a sea of endless galaxies. It made us realize how small we were, and just how mind-numbingly big the universe was. We launched Voyager 1 in 1977, and it took 35 years for it to leave our Solar System. For it to reach the nearest dwarf galaxy (Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy), while traveling at its current speed of 61,000 km/h — will take 25,000 light years. Voyager 1 will probably never leave our galaxy, even though it has already escaped the Sun’s gravitational field and has entered interstellar space. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so even if it were traveling at the speed of light, which it most definitely isn’t, it would take at least 40 million years. Pretty safe to say that it won’t be functioning for that amount of time.
After Voyager 1 had completed its mission, at the request of Carl Sagan, it was made to turn its camera around one last time, to take one last photograph of the Earth, before it left our Solar System for good. Carl Sagan famously called the photograph the “Pale Blue Dot”, and was taken from a distance of 6 billion kilometers. Earth takes up 0.12 pixels of the photograph.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Carl Sagan, 1994.
Chapter Two: Evolution
“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being (Genesis 2:7)”
God created Adam from the dust of the Earth, then breathed life into him. Noticing that Adam needed a partner — God is a very keen observer, after all — he removed one of Adam’s ribs and made Eve. Doesn’t sound like the most practical way to create a human, especially since God had just created Adam from dust. It really doesn’t make sense that he would have to remove one of Adam’s ribs to make Eve. Why the rib? Why not just create her from dust as well? Was the almighty God afraid of them being equals?
In any case, this is not how human beings came to pass, though a lot of people still believe this is how it happened. Quite honestly, far too many people.
Evolution, much like the creation of stars and planets, takes a very long time. It takes millions of years for stars to take shape and to be “born”, and it is no different for human beings and other animals. And again, just because it is not something we can observe in real time, does not make it false. At this point, it shouldn’t even be called a “theory” — evolution is very real, and the only ones not convinced are the ones who have simply not put in enough time in their research, if any research at all.
When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, to say it shook the world would be an understatement. Darwin put in countless hours of study and observation into his work, which turned the entire world of biology upside down, pretty much overnight. However, even before Darwin published his work, geologists and paleontologists had made compelling cases that life on Earth had been around for a very long time — much longer than what most people thought during that period. They were also able to observe that many species had gone extinct, or had changed over time. So in the early 1800’s, embryologists and naturalists had perhaps unwittingly discovered a lot of the evidence that would be needed to prove Darwin’s hypothesis.
It was Darwin’s genius however, which connected all of the dots, and showed how all of the collected evidence favored the evolution of species from a common ancestor. For this we have the finch bird to thank. For it was this particular species of bird that Darwin — during one of his frequent visits to the Galapagos Islands in 1835 — noticed to have adapted to different environments and to have developed differences and unique traits from one another — the shape of the beaks, the sources of food, and the differences in hunting styles. Yet all of them were living on the same island. This is basically how Darwin’s theory was born — of course with the help of all the collected evidence he had studied previously.
It is also worth noting that Darwin was not alone with his theory of evolution. Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist, geographer and social critic. He wrote about many controversial issues during his life — such as socialism, spiritualism and even life on Mars — but is perhaps best known for his theory of evolution by natural selection, which predated any of Darwin’s published works.
So what is evolution, exactly? Evolution is the development of life. Life developed from amino acids, which are composed of what are called carboxyl groups. These groups consist of one carbon and two oxygen atoms. The Earth used to be an incredibly hot place — it was nothing like it is today. Rocks from space constantly rained down on our planet, and formed a wide variety of molten rocks, all of which contained a huge amount of chemicals — the most important and abundant being carbon. Over the course of several million years, the Earth was able to cool down enough for water vapor to condense into liquid water, allowing for the first of many rain falls. Before long, the Earth had streams, rivers and oceans. During this period, all bodies of water were still quite hot and rich with minerals. Now things could happen. Now elements could combine, multiply and mutate. So life as we know, developed in the water. It was here where the first single cell organisms were formed, and it is also here where they evolved enough to eventually crawl out of the water.
You could also say that some of the key ingredients to make life came from space, which is exactly what happened. Had there been no meteorites colliding with our planet, the essential minerals to create life might never have made it here.
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.” — Carl Sagan
The oldest fossils have been recorded to be around 3.5 billion years old, 14 times the age of the oldest dinosaurs. In August 2016, researchers found what appear to be fossilized microbes dating back 3.7 billion years, and when considering the age of the Earth (4.5 billion years) it didn’t take too long for life to start developing on our planet.
But how can one animal develop into a whole new species? It boils down to two categories: uniqueness, and selection.
Let’s look at uniqueness first. Every creature is unique, first and foremost. While they may look similar, they all have different traits that make them unique. One could be stronger, faster, or smarter. It could be smaller, bigger or disabled.
The reasons for these differences? Every animal is made up of cells. Cells have a nucleus, which contains the chromosomes, and the chromosomes contain the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), which consists of different genes. It’s these genes that carry the information and instructions for life. The order of the cells determine the characteristics for each creature, such as hair color, eye color, etc. These will always be slightly different from one creature to the next, no matter what the species, which is why each will have slightly different characteristics. This is called selection.
Recombination and mutation are very important here. When two creatures mate, their DNA’s are copied and passed down to their offspring — but the copying of DNA does not always go according to plan. There are errors — mutations — that occur. And these mutations are extremely important. It’s actually what nature wants the most — for these mutations to happen, as they open the doors for the maximum amount of variety when forming new species. Over millions and millions of years, the DNA will become quite mutated and different from how it initially started. All we have to do is take a look at the dinosaurs to see the amount of diversity that they had. Or better yet, we could take a closer look at ourselves — Homo sapiens.
Human beings are primates — and physical and genetic similarities show that they have a very close relationship with another group of primates — the apes. Humans and the large apes have a common ancestor that dates back to around 8 million years. Humans evolved in Africa, and most of their evolution took place on that continent as well. It would be a while before they would migrate to other parts of the world. The first bipedal’s (the ability to walk on two legs) appeared around 4 million years ago. There are around 20 different species of early humans. They first migrated from Africa to Asia 2 million years ago, and then to Europe 1.5 million years ago. Homo erectus survived as a species for nearly 2 million years, ten times longer than modern humans have existed.
Here is a short time line.
- The evolution of the first primitive primates (55 million years)
- The evolution of the first gorillas (8–6 million years)
- Orrorin tugenensis appears, the oldest human ancestor thought to have walked on two legs (5.8 million years)
- Ardipithecus appear, shares many traits with chimps and gorillas (5.5 million years)
- Australopithecines appear — they have brains with a volume of around 400–500 cm3 (4 million years)
- Australopithecus afarensis appear, of which the famous Lucy was a species (3.2 million years)
- Homo habilis appears. Has a brain volume of around 600 cm3, and begins to use basic tools. Some of them started to consume meat, which is thought to have increased their brain volume (2.5 million years)
- Homo ergaster appears, with a brain volume of 850 cm3 (2 million years)
- Homo erectus appears, with a brain volume of 1000 cm3 (1.8–1.5 million years)
- Homo Heidelbergensis appears, with a similar brain capacity to that of humans (600,000 years)
- Neanderthals are found across Europe, from Britain to Iran (230,000 years)
- Homo sapiens appear, and have a brain volume of 1350 cm3 (195,000 years)
To this day, many people will refuse, and flat out deny that we came from monkeys. And they are partially correct — we didn’t descend directly from them. It’s not that easy, and that’s not how it works, either. It wasn’t just monkeys, then humans. As I mentioned above, there were about 20 different species which led to what we are now — Homo sapiens. Evolution does not stop, and is still very much in progress today. In a few million years — if we are still around — who knows what we will have evolved into. It certainly won’t be exactly the way it is now. Our genetic code will be different than what it is today. Evolution is very much in motion. It is a law of nature which cannot be stopped and is always in progress.
Here are a few more noteworthy milestones regarding our species:
- Humans start using speech (150,000 years)
- First evidence of long distance trading (140,000 years)
- First jewelry (110,000 years)
- Humans start burying their dead, and start making clothes out of animal hides (50,000 years)
- Oldest cave art is discovered, and Homo erectus dies out in Africa (33,000 years)
- Humans reach the Americas (12,000 years)
- The development of agriculture and domestication of dogs (10,000 years)
- The Stone Age ends and the Copper Age begins (5,500 years)
- The earliest known writing (5,000 years)
- The Sumerians of Mesopotamia establish the first known civilization (4,000 years)
The Sumerians may have been the first, many civilizations started developing all throughout the world soon after. Here is a list of the first 10 known civilizations, starting from the oldest.
- Mesopotamian civilization, modern day Iran, Syria and Turkey. Period: 3500 BC — 500 BC
- Indus Valley civilization, modern Northeast Afghanistan to Northwest India. Period: 2600 BC — 1900 BC
- Ancient Egyptian civilization, modern day Egypt. Period: 3100 BC — 2686 BC
- Mayan civilization, modern day Yucatan with parts of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. Period: 2600 BC — 900 AD
- Chinese civilization, modern day China. Period: 1600 BCE — 1046 BCE
- Ancient Greek civilization, modern day Greece. Period: 2700 BC — 1500 BC
- Persian civilization, modern day Iran. Period: 550 BC — 465 BC
- Roman civilization, modern day Rome. Period: 550 BC — 465 BC
- Aztec civilization, modern day Mexico. Period: 1345 AD — 1521 AD
- Inca civilization, modern day Peru. Period: 1438 AD — 1532 AD
Aeons before any of these civilizations, dinosaurs were the sole rulers of this planet, and their rule lasted for 165 million years. To put that into perspective, the oldest human ancestor — Orrorin tugenensis — lived 5.8 million years ago, and Homo sapiens have only been around for 195,000 years. Their rule was long, but it wasn’t meant to be forever. 65 million years ago, an asteroid roughly the size of Manhattan smashed into the ocean near the Gulf of Mexico, incinerating everything within a 500 mile radius. Huge pieces of the meteorite were then thrown back into the atmosphere and rained back on Earth as molten glass, the ash and dust caused by the impact obscured the Sun for decades, causing severe drops in temperature, as well as acid rains and fire storms. As a result of the impact, 50% of the species on Earth flat out disappeared practically overnight — 20% of the sharks were wiped out, 60% of the plants were gone, 98% of warm water corals were gone, and of course, 100% of the dinosaurs were no more. It marked the end of an era — the Cretaceous Era was finished. What followed was the rise of the mammals, known as the Paleogene Era. It would take the Earth approximately 10 million years to fully recover from this event.
Nothing is meant to last, however. Everything will have to face the inevitable ruthlessness of time. The current rate of extinction today is around 8,700 species a year, which equates to roughly 24 species per day. According to many geologists, we are in the midst of the 6th mass extinction. With humanity’s impact on nature, it is now comparable to the five previous extinction events which happened over the course of the last 600 million years, in which 95% of the planet’s species suffered extinction. Eventually, planets, stars and even galaxies will be no more.
There is no avoiding time. It is inevitable. Time ends all things.
Including itself.
Chapter Three: Extinction
Gods didn’t create humans. Humans created gods.
Since the dawn of time, humans have been creating gods and deities. The need or urge to worship something has always been great with human beings. Back in a time when a lot of things and events on the planet were unexplainable, humans created higher powers for themselves to believe in — throwing their trust at the skies, thinking that there surely must be something more powerful and “greater” than them. Over the course of the past 195,000 years, there is estimated to be around 3000 major gods, not counting the plethora of gods and goddesses in Hinduism.
Whenever we had problems understanding things, we would turn to religion. God was the answer to all of our problems and questions. And when people started asking more questions than they should have, their punishment was swift and, in most cases, severe.
“It may be you fear more to deliver judgment upon me than I fear judgment.” — Giordano Bruno
Unfortunately not a very well known figure to anyone outside historic and scientific circles, Giordano Bruno was an Italian friar, philosopher, mathematician and cosmological theorist. He was a naturally curious man, and couldn’t help himself from reading books forbidden by the church. One book from ancient Rome fascinated him in particular — “On the Nature of Things”, by Lucretius, a Roman poet and philosopher. Giordano’s research changed him, and he believed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but just another planet, one of many which orbited the sun. This fascinated him, and he wanted to tell people that their god (Giordano was a Catholic) was much greater than they could ever have conceived previously. He argued that since god was infinite, then the universe must be infinite as well. He was shut down by the church, and forced into exile. He became an evangelist, wandering the lands, trying to explain his theory to people. His ventures even led him to Oxford, where he was also shunned and accused of being a heretic. Disheartened and not knowing what to do, he returned to his homeland of Italy, where he was arrested and imprisoned by the Inquisition. When the time of his trial finally came eight years later, Giordano did not repent, and did not back down. He was taken to the square of Campo de’ Fiori and burned at the stake.
Just nine years after Giordano’s death, Galileo pointed his telescope to the stars. Giordano had been right all along.
In order to try to make sense of things, humans invented systems where they tried to bring order and understanding to what they couldn’t understand. For centuries, human beings have looked at the night sky and imagined shapes outlined by the stars — Taurus, Aries, Orion, Gemini, etc. Enter astrology. Having been created over 2,000 years ago, it truly is an ancient system — an accolade however, not to its benefit. Back when it was created, knowledge of stars and planets was limited. Certainly, no one had any idea that there were more galaxies than the one we were in. In fact, they had basically no idea about the cosmos at all. The real problem with astrology is that it assumes that we are the center of the universe — an extremely arrogant assumption. Not only does it make humans the focal point of everything, it also divides and discriminates them into groups, based on zero scientific evidence. Since it was created by Claudius Ptolemy, the Earth’s rotational axis has shifted by 23 degrees, throwing the entire system off. The discovery of countless new planets, stars, and galaxies has solidified astrology as a pseudo science. The misconception that Mercury is the cause for headaches, dry skin, bad luck, etc. are just that — misconceptions. The distance to Mercury from Earth is 77 million km’s. To put that into perspective, the distance to the Moon from Earth is 384,000 km’s. Rest assured, Mercury does not care about your love life, and it is physically impossible for energy to reach you from Mercury’s atmosphere because, well, it simply doesn’t have one.
With all of what we have discovered so far, it would be absurd to think that we are the only intelligent species in the universe. We’ve talked about billions upon billions of planets and stars, and even billions of galaxies. To assume that Earth is the only planet harboring intelligent life doesn’t seem very likely. In fact, it seems more impossible than anything. As even if you were to do the math, it is mathematically inconceivable to think that human beings are the only species to have superior intelligence. If we were to look at the Kardashev scale developed by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, it turns out that us humans are not even a Type I civilization yet. The Kardashev scale is hypothetical, but is broken down like this:
- Type I civilization — also known as a “planetary civilization” — this civilization can use and store all energy from its parent star. In our case, that would be the Sun.
- Type II civilization — also known as a “stellar civilization” — this civilization would be able to harness all of the energy from its parent star and distribute it to other planets, while using a Dyson sphere.
- Type III civilization — also known as a “galactic civilization” — this civilization would be able to control energy on the scale of its entire host galaxy.
Let’s return to the subject of time. More specifically, calendars. The calendar we use now is the Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII, who introduced it in 1582. However, this calendar undermines and completely disregards thousands of years of human progress. Why should “time” start with Christianity? So many important events took place before that — what right do we really have to disregard it? 12,000 years ago, the first temple (Göbekli Tepe) was constructed in Southern Anatolia, modern day Turkey. This is important because it was the world’s first major construction project — it pre-dates the Egyptian pyramids by quite a long time — 7,000 years. Massive stone pillars with a height of 6 meters and weight of 40 tonnes were erected for the temple, a feat that was amazing considering it was executed in the Stone Age. The level of coordination, communication and discipline was simply unmatched for the time, and marked the beginning of a new era. By using the Gregorian calendar, we are in a way ignoring hundreds, if not thousands, of important events — the spread of agriculture, the Bronze Age, the Indus Valley civilization, the ancient Egyptian civilization, the Minoan civilization, the Sumerians, the first Dynasty in China, Stonehenge, the siege of Troy, the Assyrian Empire, the Hittite Empire, and the Roman Empire, to name but a few.
Why should these not be included in our calendar? Leaving it out simply underplays human progress and development. Including all of these events and civilizations would represent us as a species in a far better light, and also incorporate all of our cultures into the calendar. The scientist Cesare Emiliani proposed that we add 10,000 years to our current calendar, and call it the Holocene calendar. Not only would this make our calendar more accurate and far more interesting, but the transition would also be easy as well. Instead of the year 2018 for example, it would simply be 12,018. Far more accurate and complete.
It’s yet more disturbing that even the way we judge time is based on a faith system. Human evolution and progress is much more than just Christianity — a religion that has for centuries gone out of its way to stop scientific progress. But it’s obviously not just Christianity that’s been a burden, almost every one of the major religions has done what they can to hinder scientific progress, because science will usually contradict and discredit their holy books. It should be known that science is not out targeting any specific religion or group, science is merely trying to learn how the world works, how the universe works, and how human beings work. It asks much bigger questions than any religion has ever asked, and tackles subjects far more profound. So far, the world of science has answered a multitude of incredibly important questions we would not even have known to ask if we had just worked off the holy books. If one were to seek answers from the Bible or Koran regarding biology, mathematics, geography, history or medicine, they would come up pretty empty handed. These were times when people did not know anything about plate tectonics. They didn’t know what was on other continents. They didn’t know much about different cultures or people. They were basically stuck in their own little bubbles.
Religion is bound to geography. None of us are born with a religion — that is something that is instilled to us later on in life, usually from an early age, from either our parents or by the society which we live in. Hypothetically, if you were to take a baby and completely isolate it from the rest of the world until it reached the age of reason, it is impossible that they would come out of their bubble as a Christian or a Muslim. They would have no idea what any of that is. No one is born religious; it is more that we are born into religions. A baby born in India will have a very high chance of becoming a follower of Hinduism. Why don’t these babies grow up worshiping Thor or Zeus? Sure, they were both fictional gods but, what’s to stop all gods from being fictional? What makes one god true and the other one false? Is it evidence? Because there is no solid evidence for any god, past or present. One must ask this question — there are thousands upon thousands of gods which have existed over the course of history — what makes mine the right one? Why do I denounce 2,999 gods out of 3,000? Atheists denounce those same 2,999 gods for the same reason a Muslim denounces them. Because they are not real. Because they don’t make any sense. Mathematically speaking, if atheists are 100% godless, then any religious person is also, statistically speaking, 99.966666666667% godless. Atheists just take it one god further. They believe in one less god.
A lot of people seek comfort in religion, as they believe it gives some meaning to their existence. There is nothing wrong with that. However, almost all of the major religions promise some sort of afterlife. Whether it’s heaven or some form of reincarnation, millions of people think that something is going to happen after we die, that we are going to carry on somehow. And there is something wrong with that. Millions of people currently live their lives thinking that they will be rewarded in the next one. But, what if there is no next one? So far, there has been zero evidence of there being any sort of afterlife, in any religion or belief system. This is actually a hindrance for us. Instead of living our lives to the full, we dedicate them to gods with vague promises of an afterlife — an afterlife we have no idea exists or not. Just as the idea of Valhalla seems pretty silly now — the idea of a heaven and hell will seem silly to us in a few hundred years. Human beings have been around for hundreds and thousands of years now, and during that time, a countless number of religions have come and gone. If we were to take a look at Christianity for example, it has only been around for about 4% of the time that modern Homo sapiens have been in existence.
Instead of focusing all of our time and energy into the one life we have for certain — the life that we currently live — we choose to focus on what may happen after we die. There was nothing before we were born. We weren’t all sitting around in a lobby, waiting to come to life. There was nothing. And when we die, we will return to the same nothingness from whence we came.
Nothing happens when we die. We simply die.
Death is the inevitable end for everything as we know it. Stars die. Planets die. Galaxies die. Eventually, all living things will come to an end. All of the beauty which is in the cosmos, as well as the cosmos itself, will come to an end. One day, the universe will be no more.
There are many theories of how the universe will one day come to an end. One of the most popular theories is called “The Big Rip.”
The universe has been expanding ever since its birth, and it has been observed that the expansion has been accelerating at a massive rate, moving galaxies farther and farther apart from one another. Solar systems within the galaxies would be safe because gravity would still be strong enough to keep them intact — but not forever. Eventually those would drift apart as well, as the rate of expansion would accelerate beyond the pull of gravity. Eventually stars, planets and even black holes would die, since their gravity would no longer be strong enough to hold them together, causing them to simply disintegrate. Space would expand faster than the speed of light, eventually affecting atoms, which would simply disband. Since space is now expanding faster than the speed of light, no particles would be able to interact or collide with each other anymore. The universe would eventually die as a result of the expansion, as nothing is able to collide or fuse any longer.
The next popular theory is called “The Big Crunch” — which is similar to “The Big Rip”, however this time, the process is basically reversed. In this theory, after the expansion of the universe is complete, the process will be reversed and space will begin to retract. Galaxies will race towards each other, millions upon millions of them merging with each other, creating an immense amount of heat. Everything would be ripped apart due to heat and radiation, including individual atoms. At this stage, super massive black holes would devour everything, and black holes would also start to devour each other, resulting in one gigantic, super massive black hole which would eventually contain the entire mass of the universe. In the final moments of the known universe, the final super massive black hole would devour even itself. Which leads to “The Big Bounce” theory. In this theory, the universe will simply be reborn again. There would still be enough heat and particles at this stage that an entire universe could very well start up once more. This means that the process for the birth and death of a universe could be endless — we could be living in perhaps the 4th version of the universe. Or the 400th. Or the 4,000th.
As a quick side note, the biggest black hole found is 800 million times the size of our Sun, and was formed 690 million years after The Big Bang — when the universe was just 5% of it’s current age.
The final theory, “Heat Death” seems the most plausible. The idea of this theory originates from the second law of thermodynamics which states that entropy increases in an isolated system. Entropy is the process of degradation of matter and energy in the universe, leading to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. In the context of this theory, all energy will be evenly distributed throughout the universe, eventually not leaving any room for heat or reusable energy to burst into existence. Heat Death does not mean that massive amounts of heat will eventually consume everything. Quite the opposite. As the universe expands, the temperature will decrease further and further. Heat Death is not death by heat, but the death of heat itself. Eventually, all the stars in the universe will no longer be able to support themselves, and die out. No gas clouds will remain to form new stars, since all heat will be exhausted. With the death of the remaining stars, the universe will turn dark. Due to Hawking Radiation, black holes will eventually disintegrate and also die out, leaving only a dilute gas of photons, which will decay as well. At this point, all activity in the universe has ceased. The universe is dead.
All of this may sound depressing, but personally I find it to be humbling. To know our place in the universe, to understand how incredibly small and invisible we really are, makes me appreciate life even more so. We are all the product of a biological and chemical accident. And there is nothing wrong with that. It’s actually a very beautiful thing. For the very short amount of time we are here, we should focus on taking nothing for granted.
“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Carl Sagan, 1994.
Special thanks: Edward S. Parks and Katarina Kastorskaya.
