Arjun Khemani

The Universe began from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Now, even though the Big Bang is a relatively difficult subject to comprehend than most others and we don’t even know all about it yet, and hence there’s always some or the other research going on to improve it’s understanding and our understanding of the Universe as a whole. I still take it that most of us know the basic concept at it’s simplest. If not, let’s review:
The Big Bang is how the Universe began, which started just from a single point and that point stretched and expanded far and beyond to get as big as it is now (and it’s still expanding!) It’s hard to comprehend that the entire Universe which is like HUGE—all just started with a small, negligible, dot in space (no, not in space, it wasn’t even created by then—so the dot came out of nowhere—The dot was the whole of space). Then that dot in space stretched far and beyond and kept expanding; the accumulation of the dust and gas created stars and further the amassing of stars made up the elements in our small, inconsequential periodic table and then planets were formed. 9 billion years after the Big Bang, our own solar system was born which makes Earth around 4.6 billion years old today.

The solar system gave rise to our own earth. The first life on earth showed up around 3.5 billion years ago (after approximately a billion years of the Earth’s formation). Dragons and other mammals appeared 250 million years ago (after 4.2 billion years of Earth formation). The first humans (genus homo, not homo sapiens!) appeared around 2 million years ago (around 4.5 billion years after Earth formation) and the first homo sapiens, who just turned out to be smarter than any other species on Earth and were going to “rule” Earth were born about 300,000 years ago, again around 4.5 billion years after the formation of the Earth.

Of course, then homo sapiens proved to be the most intelligent species of the “homo” genus and the other species of the homo genus were either defeated by the sapiens or some disaster struck which made the others such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals go extinct. Anyway then we homo sapiens (because of the so intelligent species that we are) made up the entire Earth as we know of today. Countries, government, money, businesses, the Internet, and everything! Of course we did have some help of the plants and other animals and organisms with us and they too “shaped the Earth” but other than that, we are pretty much the architects and main species on the planet.

We have done so much. So much. Though our lives seem “fixed”. The Universe now is so huge, it isn’t anything near the time when we only had that small point when the Universe evolved 13.8 billion years ago. Like our sun, there are a 100 billion other stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And there are two trillion galaxies in our Universe. And who knows if we have anything such as a multiverse in the whole incomprehensible world. It’s hard to even imagine how many worlds really are there in the world. These numbers just prove the fact that our worries and stresses in everyday life are just so small, so small, and insignificant when viewed from the Universal perspective. Our differences, achievements, failures, problems are so petty when in perspective with the Universe. Whenever I talk about stars and the Universe and stuff, I always feel like I am traveling into another three-dimensional place. I forget about everything when I think about how vast space really is.

And yet, we are all inter-connected. We all came up from that one single point in the Universe that spread and spread far and beyond. If that point had never been formed out of nowhere, you wouldn’t be reading this today. And not just that; everything that you call life—everything—would never have been “life”. There wouldn’t even be a thing called “life”. By physical facts and Universally, at least, we all are inter-connected and we are one.

Thanks for reading my ideas.

Footnotes:
–The Universe: Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy Steps/Space.com
–What Is the Big Bang?/NASA
–Timeline of human evolution/Wikipedia
–Earliest known life forms/Wikipedia