CHAPTER 1

From nothing to now

maybe we just got lucky

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

—ALBERT EINSTEIN, 1941

Once before a time there was nothing—so the story goes. No bugs, no planets, nostars—neither clouds of cosmic dust nor space for them to be within. Nothing fortime to clock. And then came space, and with it substance, materializing as asoup of subatomic particles during the first moments of a newborn Universe.Endlessly recombined and rearranged, those original particles continue to makeup all that's physical—from comets to custard pies, from our Sun to a swallowand the air in which it flies.

The scientific establishment takes pride in its efforts to explain Universe,from the Big Bang until recently, as a combination of chance events untouched byany intelligence or consciousness—until, of course, we human beings arrived uponthe scene. The outlandish explanations of creation offered by organizedreligions serve to convince many that science must have the better answers. Butthe sometimes stranger theories of cosmologists explaining how dumb particlesaccidentally bumbled into becoming stars and fleshy organisms make many cling tothe irrational ideas of organized religion, if only for tradition's sake. Whilethe concept of a divine planner plotting planetary orbits and designing the DNAof each new species does not bear rational exploration, could the extraordinaryroute from then to now have been random process, devoid of any intent orconsciousness?

That there was a beginning to the Universe is one point upon which science andreligion do agree. Outside the religious arena, this singular moment came to beknown as the Big Bang—a unique, naturally occurring random event, albeit one ofliterally cosmic proportions. Much of the Universe that we know is empty spacebut before the Big Bang there was not even that. This theoretical startingpoint, set at 13.7 billion years ago, brought forth massive amounts ofsubatomic particles into a newly formed space. These individual particles soonassembled themselves into simple atoms of hydrogen and helium—the firstrecognizable matter in Universe.

Universe's original atoms, instead of dispersing like ink in a glass of water,grouped together into giant clouds of thin gas dotted about the newly formedcosmos. And if our Universe were seen as a being that was 100 years old, itwould have been within its first few years that these clouds of simple atomsbegan condensing into many denser balls of gas. Within a relative one to twohours the pressure in these balls became so intense that contained and steadynuclear reactions kicked off within the hearts of the newborn stars.Illumination came to the cosmos.

In our local galaxy, the Milky Way, we have a hundred billion or more stars.Four and a half billion years ago one of them, our own Sun, was born. Soonafterwards it collected nine balls of concentrated matter around it and, bychance, the third ball away had a hot center, a high water content and a thinatmosphere of gases surrounding it—gases that would be deadly to most life formswe know. Earth spent its first half billion or so years just chilling out andsettling down to a quieter existence.

Before its first billion years passed, Earth had settled down enough for organiclife to appear, as bacteria became its first living occupants. This incrediblyversatile and persistent life form may have arisen upon Earth spontaneously. Butit is so difficult to explain how bacteria could have evolved in the availabletime that it is easier for some cosmologists to adopt the panspermia principleand believe that the first bacteria came in on a comet, or by other means fromouter space. Panspermia does not suggest how and where such a finely-craftedliving device as the bacterium could have developed accidentally, just that itwas probably somewhere else. However it came to be, this highly adaptable lifeforce soon colonized the surface of planet Earth, as its waters and land massbecame host to a growing array of increasingly complex microbial life forms.

The thin layer of soil that forms a patchy covering over the continents controlsour own existence and that of every other animal of the land. Without the soil,land plants as we know could not grow, and without plants no animal couldsurvive.

—RACHEL CARSON, SILENT SPRING, 1963

For about 3 billion years, single-celled microbes were all there was. These tinyorganisms mutated and adapted as they nibbled away at the rocks and otherinorganic matter of Earth, creating a living soil. Bacterial activity slowlyaltered the mixture of gases in the atmosphere and the organic content of theoceans, allowing more complex life forms to arise upon Earth. These more complexlife forms, whether worms or human beings, provide a warm home for more...