The Happy Accident of Our Universe

I am going to try and tell you a story. I say try, because I don’t fully understand what I’m writing to you about. I label it as happy because the reality we face may be a rarity, maybe the only one, which may have permitted our evolution, that is, human evolution, to come into being. I will not touch on the question of why.

I have been reading about the theorizing of Albert Einstein and his ilk, cosmologists and astrophysicists, telling me so many things, a great deal of which I find very difficult to understand.

They tell us that about 14 billion years ago our universe came into being when a hot, fiery, point of matter exploded and began to expand with intense and increasing speed into the space around it. For some reason, the rate of expansion slowed enough, to allow some of the energy being released to coalesce into the billions of galaxies we are aware of, made up of billions and billions of stars. Ours was among them, created some ten billion years ago. The inflation of the universe we are a part of continued to expand, and now continues to expand at an increasing rate.

Don’t ask me why this occurred?? There are hypotheses out there that I do not understand. All that they think they know is that if that hadn’t happened, the slowing in the rate of expansion which permitted the coalescing of matter, our universe could not have come into being. All that they think they know, is that our kind of universe may be the only one that would have permitted the life that exists on our planet, to have come into being.

What we think we know is that, just as there is a life cycle for every living creature on this planet, there is a life cycle for every sun at the heart of every solar system in our universe. It has been this process that has produced the chemical mix from which life has arisen. Chief among these chemicals has been the nitrogen that makes up the bulk of the atmosphere we breathe in with the oxygen that is so necessary for us every day of our lives.

At an early stage in the life of our universe, neutrinos facilitated the formation of various forms of helium on the way to converting energy into matter. At an early stage, three hundred million years after the Big Bang, there was energy being consolidated into that matter. After about a billion years, there was already a trail of low density matter some thirteen light years long.

I will not confuse you with all I have read about energy, and how it is equivalent to matter, can convert to that matter. I will not tell you about “bosuns” and “neutrinos”, “particles” and “waves”, and how they interact to turn energy into matter. I can’t, because I don’t fully understand what they are telling me. I won’t tell you about “dark matter” that is supposed to make up to seventy percent of the universe that we don’t see, can’t see. All of the universe we know about could not have happened without that “dark matter”.

Every sun in the universe is involved in a process that will eventually turn them into “black holes”. That is a condition where the internal gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from its orbit. That process involves the consumption of their energy content over a series of stages that sends that sun’s energy into the universe to be formulated into matter. Our own sun is only a tiny player among the giant suns that astrophysicists can see out there with the tools that have been built to view our universe.

 Read up on it yourself to see if you understand what scientists think they know about the universe we live in. See if you can understand how they think it will all end? I confess, I don’t. Unfortunately, they do think it will all end, billions and billions of years from now.

Relax, it won’t happen for a while and by then we will all be long gone.!

Theorists believe that there are many parallel universes out there that we are not aware of. We are not aware of them because they exist in different dimensions from our own. We are just not able to perceive them. They may be existing in the same space we occupy. It is theorized that there may be as many as ten, or even sixteen, dimensions, of which we are aware of only four.

I have read enough of this stuff to give me indigestion. But it was exciting enough that I just had to tell you about it. Not all about it, just some of the bits and pieces I think I understand about what they think they understand. They are out there testing their theories as we await further bulletins from the knowledge front. Stay tuned!

Stand by for further bulletins!!