I am frequently beseeched with a question about our relevance in the grand scheme of things. The grand scheme, as we understand it today started some 13.6 billion years ago. It is impossible to imagine all the matter and energy that we see in the Universe compressed into a space smaller than a pinhead but that was how it was initially before it all went KABOOM!!!
THE BIG BANG happened, the pinhead 'exploded' and everything came into being. The being and becoming started at that moment, as did distance, direction and time. Since time started at that moment, it is foolhardy to ask what was there before it.
There was no time before that. So, the concept of before and after doesn't arise. The same goes for space. Since there was no space before this seminal event, it is a stupid question to ask what was there outside of this clusterjammed pinhead. Space was born in The Big Bang and therefore there was no outside or inside of the pinhead before The Big Bang.
Science is uncovering hints to that question of 'before Big Bang' but the hints are actually just faint and uncertain glimpses through the thick haze of 'Big Bang'. So it is all too soon to talk about that now.
Matter and energy spread slowly across the length and breadth of the Universe as we see it today, the energy and the velocity at the beginning just right enough to allow gravity to weave its magic. Gravity, the weakest of the fundamental forces is perhaps the most important force on a cosmic scale. this force of attraction between particles drawing atoms together to build gas clouds which clustered and compressed together to give birth to the first stars of the Universe.
The moment of starbirth is one akin to firing a gaslight. The intense pressure of compression smashes together Hydrogen atoms, which fuse to form Helium, setting in motion gargantuan Nuclear Fusion furnaces that keep a star burning for a few billion years. Stars eventually burn out their fuel of hydrogen, whence fusion of helium into heavier atoms occurs, the process going on and on till all the elements in the periodic table till Iron accumulate within the star.
When there is nothing left to burn, larger stars give up their lives in a cataclysmic disruption called 'The Supernova'. It sheds all these elements across space. It is hard to imagine but every shard of metal, every atom of carbon within us and in fact every thing we touch and breathe and feel was born within a star and dissipated across space and time by a Supernova. We are all 'Children of the Stars' and that is where we will go into ultimately. That will be our final 'resting place', our fiery cauldron within the Fusion furnace belly of a star.
All that material strewn across a newborn star slowly collects in accretion disks around that star forming all the planets, the moons, the asteroids, the comets and the umpteen other things that go into making a star system. Stars are gathered together by gravity into galaxies, galaxies form clusters, which form superclusters, which in turn forms the physical fabric of the Universe. A hundred billion stars make a galaxy and a hundred billion of them make a Universe.
So, where does that leave us? Us, surrounding a thoroughly unremarkable star in an equally unremarkable corner of the Universe. Why did we happen to be here?
This is where theism drags in GOD and all hell breaks loose...
(to be continued...)
Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
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