Majesty in Monotony Chapter 1: Genesis of Today

1| Genesis of Today

"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 Great Cosmic Communicator

For as long as there have been sentient collections atoms, made of congealed energy in the form of complex chemicals flowing through water, including but perhaps not limited to humans, they have asked the eternal question: what the hell is going on here? Why is the sky blue? Why am I hungry? Why did a lion eat one of my siblings and why did one of my parents fall asleep forever after getting cut by a tiny rock? Why is there evil? Why do stars shine and thunderstorms roar? Why do we love? Where did we come from? Who put bop in the bop, shoo bop, shoo bop? Is the cake a lie? Do we even exist, and if so how can we be sure? And of course, what is the meaning of life, and how is it possible that we are able to ask these questions at all?

Human beings are astounding creatures, not just for our curiosity, but our ability to communicate our ideas. Through collaboration, humans have been able to reshape the planet, and understand the inner workings of the world in a way unprecedented in the whole history of the universe. However, the trials and tribulations of everyday life make it all too easy to forget our humble beginnings. It's not at all uncommon, and perhaps reasonable at times, for people to think that the lives they live are absolutely normal, and that the world they see now has always been that way. Indeed our capacity for simplification is both a testament to our cognition, as well as our Achilles Heel.

But the fact of the matter is, everything you see before you has a history that spans far beyond even your oldest known ancestor. Those questions I just posed have been contemplated by dozens, thousands, perhaps even billions of individuals just like you and me, born into a confusing and chaotic world, with only the knowledge of their predecessors to light the way. Most organisms have a hard enough time just finding food to eat, a mate to pass on their genes with, and generally trying to not die, to try and find answers to these questions. But for those that had the good fortune to find peace and nourishment, if even briefly, it was an opportunity for them to develop knowledge that in turn allowed other people to build upon, eventually leading to today. We must understand the past in order to look clearly to the future, and that means not just understanding what happened, but why we even think those things are true. The story unveiled by our curiosity has shown that there is majesty to be found in every infinitesimally small corner of an infinitesimally vast space, and we find ourselves to be smack dab in the middle of that history, with the fragmented pages constantly being translated. And like any story, it is best told from the beginning.

Born from Infinity

In the beginning, there was nothing. Possibly. The first ten million, trillion, trillion, trillionth of a second is fogged in mystery. Then, there was everything.

All force and energy and all of time and space were infinitely close, making the universe infinitely hot and infinitely dense. Then, the universe began its lifelong process of expansion, and thus, cooling. Space expanded in four dimensions; up and down, left and right, forward and backward, past and future. One undecillionth of a second later, the universe grew at a rate that would prove unparalleled for the rest of its history, inflating by a million, trillion, trillion times in size within a trillion, trillion, trillionth of a second. Then, suddenly, the force driving the inflation slowed down, and the expansion followed suit. In every place there was light, with bosons, quarks, and leptons. Energy began to come together to form the most fundamental constituents of matter. In addition, every single one of these particles was formed with a twin, nearly identical to the other with the exception of having opposite charges. Just as they were produced by condensed energy, these particle pairs annihilated back into pure energy upon contact with one another.