There are many theories about this, and in some cases they are weird. The main problem is that the only intelligent species we know of is we humans, and we don’t fully understand exactly how and why we are intelligent. We also don’t understand how the planet Earth’s development helped in this evolutionary process. The bottom line is that we don’t really know what intelligent aliens would be like or how they could evolve on alien worlds. This is new ground for astrobiology.

We now know that there are billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy, but one thing is for certain: Our planet is in a very unusual solar system. Many of the solar systems that have been discovered are different than ours. I believe that the reason for this is that our star is essentially a single star, not a binary like most other stars.

What has caused astronomers and cosmologists to change their thinking about planetary formation is the discovery of these totally alien solar systems. Our planet Earth is in a very stable planetary system compared to others systems. The gas giants in our system are out there away from our star, and the rocky planets are in close to our star, which is the Sun. We got lucky. Many alien systems formed gas giants beyond the so-called snow line, where water is frozen, but they moved very close near the star, wiping out any rocky planets, or capturing them as moons. In other words, many inhabitable planets in these alien systems are orbiting gas giants that are in the Goldie Locks region where liquid surface water is possible. Many habitable alien worlds are not planet but are moons.

Then, there are the planetary systems around K-class and M-class dwarf stars, which are much less luminous than our G-class dwarf star but are more populated in our galaxy that our Sun’s type of star.

Take, for example, M-class stars. It turns out that seventy percent of the stars in our galaxy are M-class, but no one can see them because they’re too dim. M-class stars have a temperature of 2400-3700K. Our sun, a G-class star, has a temperature of 5778K. An M-class star is only 0.08 to 0.45 times the mass of our sun. But, what’s really significant is that they’re only 0.08 times the luminosity of our sun. They radiate energy mostly in the infrared part of the spectrum and appear to be reddish in color. The fact is that many Earth-like planets have been found around these M-class stars, but they are orbiting very close to the star, close enough to be tidally locked, which means that one side always faces the star. The good news is that if the planet is in the habitable zone, liquid surface water is a strong possibility. However there is a problem with M-class stars because they have powerful magnetic fields that often tangle and send out coronal mass ejections that even more deadly than those that our Sun emits. Couple this with the fact that habitable planets would have to orbit close to the star and one could come to the conclusion that planets around M-class stars are not good candidates for life, at least life as we know it, unless that planet had a more powerful magnetic field.

What would it be like to live on one of these M-class planets? Well, for one thing, life that evolves there would see well in the infrared part of the spectrum. On an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone, the star would appear in the sky to be five to ten times the size of our sun, but it would be blood red. The vegetation would be black. Think of what it would be to see black grass and black leaves on trees. The reason our grass and leaves appear green is that they absorb the red and blue light from the sun. On a M-class star’s planet, the leaves and grass would have to be black to absorb the red light and infrared.

Aliens that evolved there would have big eyes sensitive to infrared light. Their skin might also be dark, to help keep them warm. One thing is for certain: they would be truly alien. The problem is that we have no idea how they could evolve on such a planet to become intelligent. We have nothing to go on.

Tidally locked planet close to M-class stars might not have the same problem that Mercury does. Some astronomers believe that a planet like that with an atmosphere would equalize the temperatures on both the side facing the star and the side not facing it. Winds would distribute the temperature. The good news is that M-class stars stay on the main sequence for trillions of years, so evolution can take its good old time on planets that orbit them.

K-class stars are another possible star system choice for life. A K-class star is considered an orange dwarf star with a temperature of between 3900-5200 K. They are usually lower in mass, but not by much when compared to our Sun, which is a G-type yellow dwarf star. The good news is that there are three to four times as many K-class stars as there are G-class. Alpha Centauri B is a K-class star with known planets. The other good thing about K-class stars is that they stay on the main sequence for 30 billion years as compared to the 10 billion years that our sun does.

I should point out here that the 10 billion years that our Sun is on the main sequence doesn’t meant that all 10 billion years are good for life. The main problem is that a star like ours becomes hotter by 10% every billion years. That means that in another billion years the planet Earth will have its oceans vaporized out into the atmosphere where this will cause our planet to heat up even hotter than Venus, which has a surface temperature of 900 degrees. So even though the Earth will be safe from complete destruction for another 4 to 5 billion years, the planet will not be habitable for that long.

Aliens that live on planets that orbit K-class stars wouldn’t have to deal with their planet being tidally locked like those that orbit M-class stars. They also wouldn’t necessarily have plants with black leaves. Their plant leaves could be purple, violet or even red in color to capture the orange light from their star. Even though their star would be not quite as bright as our Sun, it would be bright enough to see well in visible light. That means that intelligent life that evolves on a planet in the habitable zone of a K-class star could resemble us.

One problem we have with alien Earth-like planets is that some of them might not have land. They would be considered water worlds. It is possible for intelligent life to evolve on a water world? The answer is no because they can’t discover fire and work with metals. However, flying creatures on such a planet might have a chance to do these things. Again, they would be alien to us.

Finding intelligent alien life is not going to be easy, but at least we are now on the path to finding possible habitable planets nearby to us. Since we don’t have any possible scenarios for evolution on alien planets, we are just guessing as to how intelligent life could evolve. Astronomy and especially astrobiology will be interesting fields of study in the future.

The truth is that life is probably everywhere, but intelligent life is rare and we just have to get used to that. It’s not going to be easy to find other intelligent species, but they’re out there. I’m certain of it.

How did we evolve?

This is a very complicated question for science because there are lots of conflicting theories about how it occurred. Wiki says that it went like this: Approximately 4 billion years ago life appeared in the oceans. Cells that could employ photosynthesis appeared around 3.9 billion years, but it wasn’t until 2.5 billon years that life evolved that could use oxygen. Around 2.1 billon years, more complicated life appeared, known as Eukaryote, which is the precursor for plants like algae and fungi. At approximately 1.2 billion years, sexual reproduction evolved, which resulted in much faster evolution. Something (choanoflagellates) that became the ancestor for animals appeared at 900 million years ago. This was a life form that could move around. However, it wasn’t until 600 million years ago that a multicellular (contained different kinds of tissue) animal evolved, but it was only like a sponge. Around 580 million years, animals (cnidarians) could move. In other words they had muscles. The next step was flatworms that had brains. This happened approximately 550 million years ago. More complicated worms evolved around 540 million years ago, and they had hearts and a circulatory system along with gills for breathing under water.

Chordates were the next big evolutionary step around 530 million years ago because they had a skeleton, which eventually led to a vertebrate at around 505 million years ago, which led to a Placodemi, a prehistoric fish, at 480 million years. Then it gets much better with the appearance of Tetrapods, basically things with fins and then legs at 390 million years. The first amphibians appeared around 365 million years and they developed true legs and lungs that evolved into reptiles at 300 million years. This led to egg laying creatures as well as insects. This is very important because the Amniota appeared around this time. This creature could reproduce and lay eggs on dry land.

Mammals appeared about 256 million years ago. This was a branch off of reptiles. Mammals keep the egg inside and give birth the way we do. Eventually, the earliest mammal led to a common ancestor (Euarchontoglines) of mice and men around 100 million years ago.

The precursors to Primates, which is what we are, appeared around 85-65 million years ago. These were small rodent like mammals that ate insects and were nocturnal. At around 63 million years ago, things that resembled monkeys and apes appeared and many branches started. Note that this is several million years after the destruction of dinosaurs by an asteroid collision. In other words, an asteroid collision in the Yucatán cleared the way for our evolution.

At around 15 million years ago, the first Hominidea (Great apes) appeared. These are the precursor to us in the form of the Hominina, the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans that appeared around 7 million years ago. In other words, this is where human evolution branched away from that of the apes, or so they believe. Remember that this timeline is based on fossils, but the fossil record going back for several million years is sketchy at best, and when it comes to human evolution, it’s downright difficult because there weren’t that many hominid creatures running around, so their fossils are rare.

The first hominin (Ardipithecus) like creature appeared around 4.4 million years. However, tAustralopithecus appeared around 3.6 million years ago. This is the granddaddy of the homo line, which appeared in East Africa at 2.8 million years. Homo habilis (the tool maker) was the precursor to Homo erectus, the first hominin that walked upright. Homo erectus resembled a human and a fairly large brain. These appeared around 1.8 million years. Homo antecessor is the common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals, and it appeared in 1.2 million years. Modern Homo sapiens appeared somewhere around 200 thousand years ago. So, you can see that it was a long and torturous journey for evolution to produce us humans.

Recently, a new homo species was discovered. It was found in a cave in South Africa and has been called Homo naledi. Remember that Homo is the genus that we belong to. The good news here is that they found many bones, giving them a complete skeleton of this new species. These creatures are pre-human and had feet and hands like us, and probably walked with a similar gate. However, their skull size is much lower than us, meaning that their brains were not nearly as developed. At this point, the significance of this discovery as to human evolution has not been ascertained.

There are many factors that contributed to the development of intelligent creatures on Earth. One of these is the fact that early species learned how to make tools. This required the evolution of a marvelous appendage known as the human hand with its opposable thumb. Early humans could hold object into precise orientations and complete operations that would have been difficult for an ape. The human brain, which uses up most of the oxygen and nutrients, developed because of this tool making evolution and the consumption of meat, which supplied plenty of nutrients. These two developments came together to produce us.

Could evolution have created intelligence by another process? That’s a good question, and its answer has significance for the evolution of intelligence on alien worlds. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading.

How did we end up being intelligent?

This question should be: how did a single celled creature evolve into a complicated intelligent creature like us?

Religion explains it like this: After God created the Sun, the Moon and the Earth and separated land from water by means of the firmament, He populated Earth with plants and animals. And then, He created Adam by breathing life into dirt, after which He created Eve by taking a rib from Adam. If we look at this carefully, we see several important concepts. First, we have the idea of a firmament. This was the ancient idea of how the sky worked. Water, which falls down from the sky in the form of rain, comes from the firmament that holds back the water.

The next important idea is that plants came before animals and that man was at the end of the creation story. Also, we see the idea that God has the breath of life and can form life by breathing into dirt. The last point is that woman came from man because man complained that he didn’t have anyone to talk to. Boy, that was a mistake, because the woman sure made up for his being alone and in silence. That’s a joke. I think that the rib was used to create a woman to show that a woman is a person like a man and that they are linked forever in a partnership of propagating the newly created world.

Remember that man was given the order to multiply, take care of creation and use it wisely. That certainly got screwed up, and it’s the main reason that Adam and Eve got kicked out of paradise. The bad part is that it meant that we have to suffer for their stupid sin of wanting to be like God.

The Book of Genesis is an allegory, which is a story that reveals a truth. No one was there when creation took place, so the writers of the Bible created a story to reveal the concept that God is responsible for all of creation. The Bible was not meant to be a physics or biology textbook. It reveals a truth by means of a story, and it’s the very important truth that God created everything.

Science’s explanation for how we became intelligent is complicated and incomplete. The reason for this is that most of it happened in the distant past, in geological history millions of years ago. Time, erosion, and change have erased much of the evidence for the evolution that has occurred. But, one thing is for sure. Where we are had a lot to do with why we’re here.

Our perfect planet is in a perfect orbit around a perfect star in a perfect location in a perfect galaxy. That’s the simple answer. The complicated answer goes like this: Our planet is just the right size, not too large and not too small. If it were smaller, the iron core in the center would have stopped spinning, which would have lost our magnetosphere resulting in our atmosphere being ablated by the solar wind. If our planet were larger, we would have had trouble moving around on it, unless we were on Krypton and were like the precursors to Superman.

Our planet also has a moon that stabilizes our planet’s spin. This is important because without the moon, our axis would wobble too much, causing the climates in most locations to change radically. This would have prevented survival for early humans.

Our planet orbits our star, the Sun, at a perfect distance. This prevents us from becoming like Venus, which is way too hot and Mars, which is way too cold. Like Goldilocks, we are just right.

Our star is just right because it’s a G-class yellow dwarf star. The class has to do with its emission spectra, but what it means is that our star stays on the main sequence where it fuses hydrogen into helium for a very long time, ten to twelve billion years. That means that it stays at roughly the same luminosity for a long time, which allows evolution to take place over several billion years. Planets around larger stars like large O-class that don’t stay on the main sequence long enough are not that fortunate. K-class red dwarf stars can harbor planets with life and they stay on the main sequence even longer than G-class stars, but they must orbit closer because K-class stars are not as bright and this means that the planet runs the risk of being tidal locked where one side always faces the star. We are lucky to have a star like our sun. Or you could say that we were meant to have all of these benefits.

Our star is also not part of a binary system. Many stars are, and a binary system where two stars orbit one another makes it more difficult for planets around them to have stable orbits. This is important because most star systems contain gas giants, and in our case Jupiter, our big gas giant, orbits at just the right location to help prevent large asteroids from hitting us. There have been large asteroid collisions in the geological past, the last being 65 million years ago, but they are rare and that helps evolution.

Our solar system is in the perfect location in our galaxy, the Milky Way. We are not in a major arm of the galaxy where supernovae and other cosmic events take place more frequently. This also favors evolution. We are also far enough away from the center of our galaxy where there is lots of intense radiation from the supermassive black hole at the center and the presence of large stars that like to go supernova, causing gamma ray bursts.

Our planet has oxygen in its atmosphere and lots of surface water in the form of oceans. Both of these things are necessary for evolution to create intelligent life. Without oxygen, metabolism would be excruciatingly slow. The introduction of oxygen by cyanobacteria billions of years ago made it possible for the rapid evolution of multicellular animals that resemble fish and amphibians, the precursors for life on land.

The other important characteristic of our planet is that it has landmasses. This development was necessary for intelligent life to evolve on the surface. Fish, whales and dolphins don’t have hands, which are needed to make tools and consequently to develop a brain that is able to create technology.

It is possible that whales and dolphins are intelligent, but we have been unable to make contact with them. They are essentially alien life forms as far as we are concerned. Speaking of this, my next essay will explore how we evolved to what we are today.

How did life begin?

There are plenty of theories about how life started, including the following theories: it came from Mars, formed in the primordial oceans, came in comets during the late bombardment, drifted here from planets around other stars, or it was delivered by the tooth fairy. Yes, there is evidence of organic molecules in nebulae, accretion discs around proto-stars, and even on moons around the gas giants, but not one of these ideas explains how the main ingredient for life formed, namely DNA.

DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid, and it is the cornerstone of life. It makes reproduction possible and every living thing on the planet Earth has it. In fact, parts of our human DNA are in the DNA of plants and insects. This wonderful and truly amazing molecule was in the single-celled creatures that existed billion of years ago. These single celled creatures evolved into multi-celled creatures and then fish and amphibians that eventually crawled onto land and evolved into us in a very complex manner over hundreds of millions of years, and they brought the DNA with them.

Even if you theorize that early life only had RNA, ribonucleic acid, it’s still hard to explain how it came into existence. Just to be sure that you understand how complicated RNA is, I will describe its molecular structure. RNA is a single-stranded, long-chain molecule, unlike DNA, which is a double-stranded molecule. RNA contains ribose, which is a monosaccharide (sugar-like) with five carbon atoms. Basically, it has a pentose structure with an oxygen atom and four carbon atoms in a five-membered ring with hydroxyl groups (OH) hanging off of the carbons. The specific structure is D-ribose because its stereospecific, which means that it’s oriented in a specific three-dimensional manner. Now, RNA is actually a sugar formed from ribose connected by phosphate groups. Phosphate groups have four oxygen atoms connected to a phosphorus atom. The pentose groups are connected to two adjacent oxygen atoms by means of removing a hydrogen atom from the hydroxyl groups on the pentose so that the oxygen atoms attached to the pentose ring make up two of the phosphate oxygen atoms. It goes like this Ribose-O-P-O-Ribose. There are two other oxygen atoms connected to the phosphorus atom. This is how the RNA strand is constructed. Each ribose group can have one of four possible base units attached to one of its ring carbon atoms. These bases are called either pyrimidines or purines and they are complicated structures with nitrogen atoms in a ring structure along with other atoms like oxygen and surfer. The four bases are Adenine, Cytosine, Uracil, and Guanine. The arrangement of these base units determines what proteins the RNA creates after cellular mitoses. RNA can be synthesized but it requires enzymes to accomplish it and it requires DNA as a template.

One theory says that the conditions on Mars were more suitable to the formation of RNA because of the presence of Boron, Molybdenum and oxygen there, and by means of the panspermia mechanism this RNA got transported to Earth.

The theory that life formed from non-living chemicals is called Abiogenesis. Supposedly, RNA and the four base units were created from pyrimidine, which is found in meteorites and is one of the most common organic molecules in space. RNA and the four base units could have been produced under space conditions by bombarding pyrimidine (a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon) frozen in ice with UV radiation, or so the theory goes. NASA Ames lab reported this amazing achievement on March 3, 2015. If this is a valid experiment, then this could explain how the chemicals necessary for life began.

Abiogenesis has three parts: geophysical, chemical and biological. The first two have been determined, but the last one is where we are currently stalled. The chemicals needed for life were created from simpler molecules in space. The atmospheric and environmental conditions are known to be amicable for the development of life, but how it actually happened is still unknown.

The earliest evidence for life on Earth is 3.5 billion years ago. This is evidenced by the discovery of microbial fossils in 3.48 billion year old sandstone. Even if life had formed earlier the late heavy bombardment period would have wiped it out. There are lots of theories about how life actually began but no definitive proof. No one has synthesized a living cell from chemicals.

Until life can be created from non-living chemicals this concept is still a theory. It’s a good theory, but it’s not absolute proof. If it is proven as in the NASA experiment, then we could say that life originated spontaneously and is probably ubiquitous in the universe.

Of course, Religion would have a problem with this. The idea that life spontaneously came from non-living matter is hard to understand in the concept of creation. I don’t think it’s a problem because how God created life is not germane to the concept of creation. God has his ways, and who are we to argue.

Thanks for reading.

Why do we exist?

We humans are interesting creatures. Unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, we wonder about why we are here and where we are going. Some of us don’t believe that we actually exist. Some think we’re just part of someone’s imagination or dream, or even that we’re in a Matrix, created either by humans in the future or more advanced aliens. Is what we perceive as reality actually there or is it just a figment of imagination? Both could be true, but for the most part, we accept that reality is real.

If we are real, then why are we here? Why do we exist? There are many answers to that fundamental question.

Religion tells us that we exist because God created us to love Him and eventually return to Him. The problem with this is that we don’t really understand the mind of God. We have no idea why He would create us. He doesn’t need us. All we do know is that we need Him.

Why did God create us as flawed creatures? Unlike God who can do no evil, we can be evil. God is by definition good and incapable of evil. That’s why He’s perfect and we’re imperfect. Why do we have to go through this trial period on Earth to find out if we’re worthy to be with God? It’s not a fair system because for some it’s easier. Or, maybe this is the test to see if we are worthy. We are put through tribulations to see what we’re made of, whether we have the mettle to be with God. It’s easy to see why there are so many different religions and concepts about God’s plan for us. But, we really don’t know what God is like. All we have are clues from his prophets and from Jesus, but even their insights can be confusing. All we know is that we need God if we’re ever going to escape this life to be with Him forever. Religion is only a service to get us there. Religion provides us with a means to worship God and behave ourselves. God doesn’t need our worship. We need worship to remind us that we need God. We can’t influence God by what we do. All we can do is screw ourselves up. It’s up to us to do what God has told us to do, which is live in peace and love. That’s one thing that we do know about God, that He likes peace and love. Religion is supposed to help us understand that.

Science on the other hand, has plotted out the reason we exist in exquisite detail. They call it evolution, and it’s been going on ever since the Big Bang. By evolution, I mean all of the events that have shaped the universe and us, not just Darwinian evolution, which has only happened in the last four billion years, and as far as we Homo sapiens are concerned only about a few million years. Actually we Homo sapiens have only been around in our present form for around two hundred thousand years. The universe has been around almost 14 billion years, so we’re literally newbies.

If you consider all of the events that had to occur for us to exist, it’s mind-boggling. Since the Big Bang cooled quickly to condense energy into matter and antimatter, it’s amazing that the universe progressed to form the kind of matter that makes us up. Matter and antimatter annihilate each other, but there was just a tiny fraction more matter and it persisted to make what we see today. Then, gravity, which just happens to be weaker than the other three forces of nature (electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear) slowly attracted matter in the form of hydrogen gas to clump into masses that eventually compressed down enough to cause nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. This process was aided by magnetism, a force that is needed for stars to form. This combined gravity and magnetism allowed the creation of massive stars that only lived for a short time (ten to a hundred thousand years) before going supernova and producing the higher chemical elements that are needed to make planets and us. Dark matter also helped in this process and eventually caused some massive stars to end up as black holes that began to attract other stars into galaxies. Galaxies allowed the formation of dwarf stars like our sun that stayed on the main sequence to burn hydrogen and remain stable enough to form planets. Massive stars don’t last long enough to do this.

Planet formation is a common process. When supernovae spread gas and dust containing all of the elements into space, the nebulas that results eventually become new star nurseries. The stars that form in them have large gas and dust rings orbiting around them, and that’s what forms planets just what happened around our proto-sun over 4.7 billion years ago.

Now, in order to have life, one must have water. Well, it turns out that hydrogen and oxygen are the most abundant elements in the universe and when combined they form water, lots of water. When a new star becomes hot enough to support fusion because of gravity compression, it ignites and blasts the ice that orbits it out away from it. This ice dam or snow line is far enough away so that the star’s heat doesn’t vaporize the water. This ring of ice chunks and particles is what forms the cores of gas giants, which attract hydrogen and helium gas. Jupiter formed like this and because of the dust and debris in the accretion (stuff clumping together) disc that it formed in, slowed because of drag and moved closer to the new sun. This dragged ice into the inner solar system and this is what collided with the Earth during the late bombardment period (about 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago). This is where our oceans came from. The idea that the oceans came from comets or asteroids later has been changed. It turns out that there are also massive amounts of water chemically bound and trapped in the Earth down some 300 miles under the surface. There is more water there than what’s in all of the oceans. The bottom line is that we have water on the Earth and it was needed to form life or at least support it.

The Panspermia theory says that all of the inner rocky planets had water at one time (think billions of years). Mercury is too close to the sun and too small to support an atmosphere, which is needed for surface water. Venus had water but it was still too close to the sun and the water boiled up into the atmosphere. Water is a good green house gas, and now Venus is hotter than you know where. Mars also had atmosphere and surface water but it cooled too quickly and its core stopped rotating and because of that it had no magnetosphere to protect it from the solar wind, which eventually ablated its atmosphere off into space. However, a meteor crashed into Mars before this happened and sent life that formed there to the Earth. So, that theory says that we’re Martians. That, in a nutshell, is why we are here, or so that theory goes. However there are difficulties with the idea of how life started. I’ll discuss this in the next part.

Thanks for reading.

Where did the universe come from?

This is the most important question because without the universe we would not exist. Most cosmologists believe that the universe started with the Big Bang. How did this theory come about? The answer is that it goes back to Einstein’s relativity theories. Einstein knew that the universe had expanded but he came up with the idea that gravity had countered the expansion effect and the universe had settled into a steady state. He called this ratio of gravity versus expansion the cosmological constant. This idea was abandoned when Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was still expanding and that galaxies were moving away from one another. Einstein had the means to predict that the universe began with the Big Bang, but he was too enamored with a static universe to accept this idea. Even geniuses make mistakes.

It was Fred Hoyle, the British astronomer, who coined the name ‘Big Bang’ to make fun of Edwin Hubble’s idea that the universe is expanding and thus had an explosive beginning if you extrapolate the expansion of the universe back in time. Fred Hoyle insisted that the universe was static and not changing. This has since been proven to be wrong.

The most credible evidence for the Big Bang is the discovery in 1964 of Cosmic Background Radiation, the faint microwave signal that seems to come from every direction. This is hard evidence for what was previously only a theory. The microwave radiation is like a left over clue of a cosmic event some 14 billion years ago. This discovery changed everything.

So, if we accept that our universe started with a bang from an infinitely small primordial object, then the next question to ask is: where did the primordial object come from? This is where it gets dicey. There are lots of theories but no proof.

Religious leaders jumped on this Big Bang idea and said that it proves the existence of God, that God created the universe in this manner. They propose that nothing existed until God created time, space and all the energy required to create the universe that we live in. This concept is interesting in that it reveals many things about God. One is that God exists outside of time and space and that God decided to make a universe for a reason. That would suggest that God got bored and decided that He needed to create creatures less than Him (which are the only kind that he could create) so that they could recognize how great He is, or that He was lonely and decided that He wanted to create other beings because it gave Him something to love.

When I use the term less, I mean that we are flawed beings compared to God. God is perfect and immutable. But if that’s the case, why did He need to create us if that was in fact His primary reason for creating a universe? That question leads us to another question of why do we exist? God certainly doesn’t need us, and we’re flawed. What’s even worse is that in many cases we humans don’t even care that God created us. Despite the fact that many people believe in a God, many more don’t.

One thing that we don’t understand is how God actually created the universe’s primordial object. Did He take something of Himself to do it, or did He have access to stuff that He could form into the object. These are questions that religion cannot answer, and it appears that science is unable to come up with a provable theory to explain it.

Most cosmologists don’t consider God to be the primary reason the universe exists. They don’t like the idea that nothing existed and that a primordial object just popped into existence. Some quantum physicists do accept the idea that quantum particles can pop in and out of existence because of the Quantum Uncertainty Principle. That’s a provable concept, but to suggest that the Uncertainty Principle is the reason for the primordial object that led to the Big Bang is a stretch. Most cosmologists accept the fact that the Big Bang just happened without a creator’s intervention.

So, how could the Big Bang just happen? That’s a big question in cosmology. The reason for this is that many believe that the primordial object was a singularity, which is an idea that no one understands. A singularity is what happens when one compresses matter to the point that it violates Einstein’s relativity theories. It’s could be what’s inside a black hole. However, no one has been able to describe a singularity or even prove that it exists.

There are, however, several theories to explain what happened to cause the Big Bang.

The most prominent theory is the Brane Theory. Branes, or membranes, are part of string theory. Branes can be thought of as two-dimensional sheets in which strings (think of subatomic particles like quarks here) are attached. There are infinite numbers of these branes and they occasionally make contact, resulting in Big Bangs, which means that there are lots of universes. All of this is based on mathematics. There is no physical evidence for strings or branes.

The Lattice model assumes that there is an infinite lattice of fermions (elementary particles like electrons, protons and neutrons and the particles that make them up) that are distributed over the fundamental domain (a region of space) and that they were in the lowest entropy state possible before the Big Bang. This still doesn’t explain why the lattice was there in the first place.

The Big Bang is the result of a Big Crunch that occurs occasionally from an infinite number of bubble universes when gravity pulls matter back down to a singularity. This assumes that bubble universes formed at some point during the expansion period directly after the Big Bang, but why they would do this is unknown, or at least unproven.

The Hartle-Hawking state is a theoretical idea that the singularity that exploded into the Big Bang always existed without a space and time boundary. The time and space boundary only came into existence after the Big Bang. This still doesn’t explain why that singularity was there.

None of these theories can be proven other than mathematically.

So where does that leave us? We know that the Big Bang occurred, but there is no real proof about how it happened. It just did.

I believe that something as complicated at the universe could not have been an accident. It had to have been planned. Things exist for a reason, at least that’s what seems logical to me. A supreme being was responsible, but there is no proof of this. It’s just something that one must believe in without proof. That’s called faith.

I’m starting out this series with a definition of the term ‘universe’.

The literal definition of the universe is that it’s everything that exists, has existed, and will exist. As far as we know, the universe is made up of both matter and energy. Fortunately for us, the amount of matter in the universe is just enough to have prevented the universe from collapsing back onto a singularity or expanding so fast that it could not form stars and galaxies.

The universe is thought to consist of 4.6% atoms, 23% dark matter and 72% dark energy. We know about atoms and what they are composed of, but we do not currently understand what dark matter or energy is. Thus, we only understand 4.6% of the universe. The other part is unknown.

Originally, 13.7 billion years ago, the universe consisted of 12% atoms, 15% photons, 10% neutrinos, and 63% dark matter.

Matter in the universe today consists of atoms, ions, and electrons, which form stars, planets, nebulae and other cosmic objects. Matter can exist in the form of solid, liquid, gas and plasma. There are also theoretical forms. Besides that, elemental or quantum particles can exist in space, and that includes things like photons, neutrinos, antimatter and quarks.

First of all, we have no idea how extensive the universe is. The reason for this is the fact that both time and space expanded after the Big Bang. We believe that the universe is 13.7 billion years old because of the cosmic background radiation temperature data, but we don’t know how large the universe is because of the fact that the universe expanded faster than light for a short period right after the Big Bang, and it’s still expanding at an accelerated rate.

Because of direct observation, mostly with the Hubble telescope, we can currently say that the observable universe is 91 billion light years in diameter. If we take half of that, we have a radius of 45.5 light years. That’s much larger than 13.7. I’m using the logic here that if a specific packet of energy formed at the Big Bang and then it formed atoms that ended as a galaxy, we would see it 13.7 billion years later if nothing expanded. With expansion, we would see it much later, which is the case. The reason why we don’t know the true size of the universe is that the expansion is near the speed of light at the furthest extent of what we can see. The light that comes from things beyond that point can’t get back here. The bottom line is that we have no idea how large the universe really is.

Current thinking is that the universe is infinite with a finite time. That’s based on observations of the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang and several other observations using the latest spacecraft probes. However, this conclusion is only theoretical because we can’t see beyond the edge of the universe that is still observable. The galaxies at this observable edge will eventually vanish because of the expansion.

The observable universe is estimated to contain 100 billion galaxies and 300 sextillion stars; although, there could be many more than this. Stars are contained in galaxies, galaxies are clumped into galaxy clusters and galaxy clusters are clumped into galaxy superclusters. If one could observe the universe from outside it would appear to be like a tangled sponge structure. The universe is both homogeneous and isotopic, meaning that it looks the same from any direction and there is no center. That sounds to me like an infinite universe.

Astronomers study the structure of the universe. They try to understand what stars are made of and why they are collected into structures that are called galaxies, and why galaxies are collected into clusters. They also try to understand the structure of planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and energy phenomena like pulsars, quasars, and gamma ray bursts. These are the things that can be seen because they emit or reflect light across the electromagnetic energy spectrum, which includes visible, ultraviolet and infrared as well as radio frequencies. To do this they use reflector telescopes, radio telescopes and a host of space probes that can detect electromagnetic energy across the full spectrum. Astronomers are also interested in how stars form, exist on the main sequence, and ultimately die. They study the remnants of star deaths, including nebulae, white dwarfs, neutron stars, pulsars, magnetrons and the ultimate astronomical objects, black holes.

Cosmologists are interested in how the universe formed and what its final fate is. They rely on observations made by astronomers, but they also use quantum physics. Some consider cosmology to be a branch of metaphysics, which is a branch of philosophy. Cosmologists deal with the extremely large.

Quantum physicists deal with the ultimate structure of the universe and how it actually works. Most of their work is theoretical using math. They study things like quarks, bosons and leptons. They deal with the extremely small.

Amazingly, science now studies the universe from both ends, both the very small and the very large. We know more than we ever did, but we’ve only scratched the surface. In my next essays I want to discuss the big questions about the universe that we humans ask.