A More Positive Outlook

I originally scribbled this down a few months back, while pondering the sorry state we're currently in as a species.  I often find it difficult to remain optimistic in our present global climate of ignorance, greed and distrust, but every now and then, a light shines through and I think, Y'know, we might not be so buggered, after all.

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The Earth formed four and a half billion years ago.  For more than half of its existence, it was bereft of life, but as it cooled, circumstances - temperature; atmosphere; chemical compounds; water - were just right for life to form.  The formation of that life immediately changed the circumstances - using up resources; expelling different compounds - the new circumstances gave rise to new life, which resulted in new circumstances...and so on.

By the time the Earth was four billion years old, the ever-changing combination of life and environment came together to cause the Cambrian explosion: a sudden rush of evolution that gave rise to more complex and diverse lifeforms, which spent the next hundred million years or so growing and expanding and dealing with an ice-age, until the Devonian period of fish, plant life and the earliest land animals.  That lot lasted a good two-hundred million years, before a dramatic climate shift, and second ice-age, all but wiped the slate clean and paved the way for the dinosaurs.

Things settled down again for the next hundred and fifty million years-ish, with some of the dinosaurs holding on to their reptilian roots, while others took on more avian attributes, until a meteorite hit and the whole thing required a rethink.  The larger animals couldn’t survive.  The rest either went to ground or took to the air.  Some primates, however, simply got smarter.

Over the next sixty-five million years, the primates’ intelligence grew - thinking their way to survival - and a certain branch learned to not only adapt to their environment, but to adapt their environment to them.  Tools; shelters; clothing.  They learned to grow crops; they learned to hunt rather than simply relying on the land.

A mere two hundred millennia ago, we finally emerged.  A mere two hundred thousand years, after more than two billion of evolution.

In a time when our species is so at odds with itself, I’m comforted by the fact we’re still so young.  Our capacity to learn has afforded us a great advantage over previous species: where evolution once took thousands of generations and millions of years, our thirst  for understanding, and powers of empathy and self-awareness accelerated our own.  Physically, little has changed over the last two hundred thousand years, but our ever-expanding intellect has taken us from seeing the sun as a deity to understanding it is in fact a big ball of burning gas; from thinking of the Earth as a flat plain several thousand years old to (most of us) knowing it’s a four and half billion year-old sphere; from being locked firmly to the ground to crossing the oceans by air and sea, and even walking on the moon.

While in recent millennia, we have stumbled - morality was replaced with religion; empathy with a distrust of people beyond our artificial borders; our thirst for knowledge with the desired comfort of ignorance - these things are fleeting and cannot sustain themselves.  They weaken us as a species and hold us back, but in the end, those clinging to these dying attitudes will themselves die out; left behind while the rest of us come together to seek out the next unreachable horizon...and reach for it.

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The latest inspiration for this somewhat-rosier-than-usual outlook comes from China's drive to be a significant global player in the world of science.

While chasing a dominant footing, there appears to be a prevailing attitude of global cooperation in China's scientific community: an acceptance that, without that cooperation, any advancement will only get so far, and will be soon outstripped.

On the world stage, science is tragically unique - or, at least, in very limited company - in this regard.  While national leaders squabble like children over who owns what, who has the biggest and best toys, and who's omnipotent ghost could deck anyone else's omnipotent ghost, scientists the world over are united in their goal to advance the knowledge and understanding of everyone.  Whether it be the various teams at CERN or on the International Space Station, there's an acknowledgement that the best thing for everyone is to work together.

And if even a regressive, constrictive and skittish government like China's can see the benefit of international cooperation, then there's yet hope for the rest.

Where it ALL Began?

I'm not a physicist.

Just wanted to get that out of the way before I launch into this, so you know I claim no qualified scientific backing to anything I'm about to say.  Then again, what I'm about say probably makes that opening statement redundant anyway:

I don't entirely buy the Big Bang theory.

No, I'm not about to argue the case for Genesis: I spent 12 years going to Catholic schools, and the main thing I took from all of those Religious Studies classes was that it was all bollocks (but that's a rant for another day).

My lack of conviction with regard to the birth of our universe stems from two questions:

1. What came before?
2. What happens when a galaxy dies?

There are several theories concerning what lies beyond our universe and where it all may have come from.  These are too numerous and complicated to get into in any great detail here (not least because I barely understand most of them), but as far as I'm aware, one of the most mathematically sound (or, at least, broadly accepted) at the moment suggests vast sheets of...stuff, flapping around out there, beyond our particular plane of existence.  As these sheets ripple, they will occasionally touch, and the result is a singularity that spawns a universe, much like our own.

The issue I have with these theories - aside from their unfathomability to my scientifically illiterate little brain - is they seem predicated on the assumption that our universe is not all there is, and that there must be something grander out there, beyond its borders.

But what if there isn't?  What if our universe is all there is?  What if the Big Bang was actually just a Big Bang?

Two of the biggest clues backing up the theory of the Big Bang are the motion of the galaxies in the observable universe - everything appears to be moving away from a central point (the singularity) - and background radiation, said to be left over from the initial expansion.

So, I got to thinking about that singularity.  Essentially, it's a Black Hole: a single point in space in which everything is condensed into one, solid thing, even down to an atomic level (blow up an atom's nucleus to the size of a football, and its protons and electrons will be orbiting miles away - in a singularity, even atoms' component parts are squished into a single point).

A particularly big (Super Massive, you might say) Black Hole lies at the heart of every spiral galaxy: it's what gives such galaxies - including our own - their shape.  We're effectively water going down a plughole, which means our precious Milky Way won't last forever.  Eventually, everything that makes up a spiral galaxy will be devoured by the Black Hole at its heart, or the Black Hole itself will reach a point where it can no longer contain itself.  Either way, the time will come when it explodes, throwing all that made up that galaxy out into the cosmos, to be picked up in the wake of other galaxies, or clump together to form new nebulae and, eventually, new galaxies.

If that's the case, then couldn't the effects we attribute to the birth of the universe not simply be from the death of a galaxy?  What if 14 billion years ago, a galaxy reached the end of its life, went the way of Thunder in Big Trouble in Little China, and spread its guts out into the deep, dark infinite, to continue the universe's eternal evolution?