How Far Have We Come ?
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| How Far We Have Come |
The Universe we know about came into existence about 13.8 billion years ago. That very moment, everything around you see around yourself burst out from a singularity. If you consider the Universe infinite in size, you can say that the Big Bang happened everywhere, even in the exact place where you are sitting right now. There was no matter in the early stages of the universe and not even light existed then. It was only about 380,000 years later that the light from the Big Bang embarked on an eternal journey which scientists now call the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation).
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| Cosmic Microwave Background (Source:Wikipedia) |
Quite a lot has happened since then, for instance, 13.8 BILLION Years have passed! Hundreds of millions of stars that light up our night sky have and are still being created in stellar nurseries. Planets and galaxies were created forming clusters of giant Galaxies. These galaxies now host hundreds of billions of stars which are probably shelter to thousands of billions of planets. These numbers sound way too big right? But that's not it, the universe also gave birth to some fascinating structures like Supernovae which mark the death of a star, Neutron stars that are incredibly dense and have extreme rotational velocity and mysterious stuff like Black Holes which can't even be precisely defined right now. But a lot more has happened here itself on our blue planet Earth. Some of which isn't even related to the physical phenomenons produced by this Universe. It is believed that our Sun is 5 Billion years old and the same is for our Planet. Data collected strongly suggests that our planet and the 7 neighbor planets were created from the Sun during our star's formation. This can be related to how the Moon was created from our Planet Earth.
Life is supposed to have started by chance in a primordial soup(pond) of organic chemicals about 3.6 Billion Years ago. There is still a debate on whether the reactants responsible to kick start Life on our planet were transported by meteors from other worlds or resulted from fortunate combination of compounds present on Earth. It wasn't until 3.4 Billion years ago that cyanobacteria started performing photosynthesis. These unicellular organisms evolved into complex life including everything you see around in "nature". The lovely fragrance of the lilacs, the cheerful face of a Dolphin, the yawn of a kitten (are you reading Salma?), all of that exists due to a chemical reaction dating 3.6 billion years back. Humans have wandered the planet for only 200,000 years now and I think we have accomplished a LOT though it's still very LESS. First humans are said to have lived in Africa who then traveled to other continents. The first humans to have lived in the Continent of Americas date back only 14,500 years. Not even close compared to the 5 billion year old Earth and Solar System.
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| Destruction of Earth by Humans |
It took more than a billion years for complex life to evolve from unicellular organisms after origin of Life but it took only 14,500 years for Earth to witness countless conflicts(literally) , fall and rise of great empires, two shattering World Wars , murders of millions of innocents, depletion of resources which took eternity to be formed, division of land on the basis of color and views, etc. Seriously, do you want to be remembered as a part of a civilization responsible for all this?
Keeping that aside, in just about 15000 years of existence, Humanity has gathered and produced a plethora of information. The flame of curiosity in the souls of humans has helped humanity reach the frontiers of science and other fields. The internet you're using right now is an excellent example. We started from the forests and now live in the concrete forests we built ourselves from our thinking(irrespective of whether we like living in it or not). We humans learned the art of survival from nature and now have completely changed our way of living, survival still exists but not exactly in the 14000 year old form. Today's survival depends on how well you score on your test or how good of a person you are in your society. Your strength or your physical ability is nothing but just a hobby today which would have been considered the most important factor for survival back then. We built civilizations that were controlled by a single ruler, created systems that ran a whole country and what not. Our imagination paved the way to almost every place we dared to discover. In only 400-500 years, we turned from using pigeons to instant messaging for communication. We are now able to keep surveillance on a bottle of water from hundreds of kilometres above surface.
Great minds like Nikola Tesla, Sir Isaac Newton, C.V.Raman, Albert Einstein, Ramanujan walked and died on this planet. We have developed machines that execute work once thought to be impossible by the highest of intelligence. Invention of electronics like telescopes which enable us to stare back into the history of our Universe has only become possible in the last few hundred years. There are our representatives out there like Voyager and Cassini and Rosetta who have voyaged distances no man-made product has ever achieved. We landed on moon just a few decades back but our knowledge of the universe beyond it is literally jaw-dropping and we still continue to explore this uncharted territory once thought to be inconceivable to the human brain. We have created and managed to run super-organisms like cities and countries. And I can't even imagine what else can we concur in the coming years, decades, centuries and millenniums! Humanity can be considered as a light of hope for this Universe to understand itself, maybe that's the reason the Universe created us... or maybe not.
Today, the whole world runs by the tick of the clock. Each and every second, thousands of millions of dollars worth transaction takes place, lives change, economies build up, societies change,etc. We live in this chaotic world where everything seems so well organized. But wait, we didn't start like this. At the beginning, it was just a bunch of tribes living their lives with the only aim being survival. It is clear, over the period of time, which is not very long on the Cosmic scale, that we've CHANGED the game "nature" planned out for us. I think it's fair to say that we've really come quite far for where we once started... but the journey's not over yet...it will never be...
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