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Be in Awe
A Perfect Balance >
All of us have looked up into the moonless night sky and seen the myriad stars there. Some of us have pondered that sight and then, unlike the rest of the life on the planet, have actually wondered about and questioned our place in this universe. Space is vast and old beyond description. Some of us are awed by the glory of it all. Some are filled with angst by its sheer enormousness.
We are merely an afterthought stuck on a puny planet, small beyond comparison, naysayers may say. Somehow for them the size of our little rock compared to a colossal universe makes us insignificant. But new discoveries are showing us something else. They show us, for instance, that for you to be able to sit and read this you need a universe precisely this big.
It was determined early in the last century by the likes of Edwin Hubble, Albert Einstein, and others that our universe had a beginning. (This was no minor side note in the history of discovery. Its scientific, philosophical, and theological implications were, like our universe, huge.)
From that beginning billions of years ago this fabric of spacetime has been expanding, carrying matter with it on what appears to be an endless voyage. And after eons of time the universe has grown to an incomprehensible size. But that enormous size is a good thing --- a very good thing.
It has only been in the last decades that the fine details of the creation event --- aka the big bang --- and the subsequent expansion have been worked out. And what they show is: If you want life, it couldn't have happened any other way.
The universe in its first moments was essentially pure flaming energy that, as it expanded, was transformed into a broth of both matter and energy. Newly formed protons only had just enough time to form the two simplest elements during the infancy of the cosmos --- hydrogen and helium. The whole place was expanding and cooling down just too quickly to form anything bigger.
As the universe continued to grow and cool the hydrogen and helium could slowly condense to form stars and galaxies. Many of the bigger stars spent their lives forging in their cores new elements such as carbon and oxygen.
The biggest stars could not only create more elements but could also explode them out into space in amazing phenomena called supernovae, essentially seeding their surroundings with the elements of the periodic table.
After several generations of stars came and went there was enough "stuff" littering space in parts of our galaxy to form both stars and planets. The newly created elements would also be the raw materials for mountains and oceans and plants and sea creatures and animals and you and me.
All this took time. And all the while this was occurring the universe kept expanding at exactly the right rate to allow it all to happen.
You see, if the universe had expanded slower than it did, the immense mass it had would have caused it to collapse back on itself in gravitational suicide. End of story for, well ... for everything.
If the universe had expanded faster galaxies could not have formed. Galaxies --- huge families of billions of stars --- are needed for subsequent generations of stars to form and for the intermixing of all the elements created from the exploded stars to collect into planets. No galaxies, no life.
And Earth could not have been created earlier when the universe was younger --- there were just no raw materials to make planets.
All indications point to the idea that the universe has to be this unimaginably big for there to be a planet like ours. We have no choice but to look out into vast regions of empty space dotted with its trillions of stars --- there is no other view possible for a living physical being.
Next time you go out to look at the stars in all their vast array, don't be discouraged at your so-called smallness: be in awe. You could not stand there and ponder the meaning of it all if the whole stage were any bigger or any smaller, any younger or any older.
Mark Ritter teaches astronomy at Temecula Valley High School and can be reached at mritter@firstlightastro.com.
Posted by Administrator at 2004.03. 6 12:43 PM | Comments (0)
