Origin Story Page 2

  We can all benefit from the maps our ancestors created. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim insisted that the maps lurking within origin stories and religions were fundamental to our sense of self. Without them, he argued, people could fall into a sense of despair and meaninglessness so profound, it might drive them to suicide. No wonder almost all societies we know of have put origin stories at the heart of education. In Paleolithic societies, students learned origin stories from their elders, just as later scholars learned the core stories of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism in the universities of Paris, Oxford, Baghdad, and Nalanda.

  Yet, curiously, modern secular education lacks a confident origin story that links all domains of understanding. And that may help explain why the sense of disorientation, division, and directionlessness that Durkheim described is palpable everywhere in today’s world, in Delhi or Lima as much as in Lagos or London. The problem is that in a globally connected world, there are so many local origin stories competing for people’s trust and attention that they get in one another’s way. So most modern educators focus on parts of the story, and students learn about their world discipline by discipline. People today learn about things our Lake Mungo ancestors had never heard of, from calculus to modern history to how to write computer code. But, unlike the Lake Mungo people, we are rarely encouraged to assemble that knowledge into a single, coherent story in the way that globes in old-fashioned classrooms linked thousands of local maps into a single map of the world. And that leaves us with a fragmented understanding of both reality and the human community to which we all belong.

  A Modern Origin Story

  And yet… in bits and pieces, a modern origin story is emerging. Like the stories told at Lake Mungo, our modern origin story has been assembled by ancestors and tested and checked over many generations and millennia.

  It is different, of course, from most traditional origin stories. This is partly because it has been built not by a particular region or culture but by a global community of more than seven billion people, so it pools knowledge from all parts of the world. This is an origin story for all modern humans, and it builds on the global traditions of modern science.

  Unlike many traditional origin stories, the modern origin story lacks a creator god, though it has energies and particles as exotic as the pantheons of many traditional origin stories. Like the origin stories of Confucianism or early Buddhism, the modern story is about a universe that just is. Any sense of meaning comes not from the universe, but from us humans. “What’s the meaning of the universe?” asked Joseph Campbell, a scholar of myth and religion. “What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there, that’s it, and your own meaning is that you’re there.”3

  The world of the modern origin story is less stable, more turbulent, and much larger than the worlds of many traditional origin stories. And those qualities point to the limitations of the modern origin story. Though global in its reach, it is very recent and it has the rawness and some of the blind spots of youth. It emerged at a very specific time in human history and is shaped by the dynamic and potentially destabilizing traditions of modern capitalism. That explains why in many forms it has lacked the deep sensitivity to the biosphere that is present in the origin stories of indigenous peoples around the world.

  The universe of the modern origin story is restless, dynamic, evolving, and huge. The geologist Walter Alvarez reminds us how big it is by asking how many stars it contains. Most galaxies have something like 100 billion stars, and there are at least that many galaxies in the universe. That means that there are (deep breath) 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1022) stars in the universe.4 New observations in late 2016 hinted that there may be many more galaxies in the universe, so feel free to add a few more zeros to this number. Our sun is a pretty ordinary member of that huge gang.

  The modern origin story is still under construction. New sections are being added, existing parts still have to be tested or tidied up, and scaffolding and clutter need to be removed. And there are still holes in the story, so, like all origin stories, it will never lose a sense of mystery and awe. But in the past few decades, our understanding of the universe we live in has become much richer, and that may even enhance our sense of its mystery because, as the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: “Knowledge is like a sphere; the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown.”5 With all its imperfections and uncertainties, this is a story we need to know, just as the Lake Mungo people needed to know their origin stories. The modern origin story tells of the heritage all humans share, and so it can prepare us for the huge challenges and opportunities that all of us face at this pivotal moment in the history of planet Earth.

  At the heart of the modern origin story is the idea of increasing complexity. How did our universe appear, and how did it generate the rich cavalcade of things, forces, and beings of which we are a part? We don’t really know what it came out of or if anything existed before the universe. But we do know that when our universe emerged from a vast foam of energy, it was extremely simple. And simplicity is still its default condition. After all, most of our universe is cold, dark, empty space. Nevertheless, in special and unusual environments such as on our planet, there existed perfect Goldilocks conditions, environments, like Baby Bear’s porridge in the story of Goldilocks, that were not too hot and not too cold, not too thick and not too thin, but just right for the evolution of complexity.6 In these Goldilocks environments, increasingly complex things have appeared over many billions of years, things with more moving parts and more intricate internal relations. We should not make the mistake of assuming that complex things are necessarily better than simple things. But complexity does matter to us humans, because we are very complex, and the dynamic global society we live in today is one of the most extraordinarily complex things we know. So understanding how complex things emerged and what Goldilocks conditions allowed them to emerge is a great way of understanding ourselves and the world we live in today.

  More complex things appeared at key transition points, and I will refer to the most important of these as thresholds. The thresholds give shape to the complicated narrative of the modern origin story. They highlight major turning points, when already existing things were rearranged or otherwise altered to create something with new, “emergent” properties, qualities that had never existed before. The early universe had no stars, no planets, and no living organisms. Then, step by step, entirely new things began to appear. Stars were forged from atoms of hydrogen and helium, new chemical elements were created inside dying stars, planets and moons formed from blobs of ice and dust using these new chemical elements, and the first living cells evolved in the rich chemical environments of rocky planets. We humans are very much part of this story, because we are products of the evolution and diversification of life on planet Earth, but in the course of our brief but remarkable history, we have created so many entirely new forms of complexity that, today, we seem to dominate change on our world. The appearance of something new and more complex than what preceded it, something with new emergent properties, always seems as miraculous as the birth of a baby, because the general tendency of the universe is to get less complex and more disorderly. Eventually, that tendency toward increasing disorder (what scientists term entropy) will win out, and the universe will turn into a sort of random mess without pattern or structure. But that’s a long, long way in the future.

  Meanwhile, we seem to live in a vigorous young universe that is full of creativity. The birth of the universe—our first threshold—is as miraculous as any of the other thresholds in our modern origin story.

  Timeline

  This timeline gives some fundamental dates for the modern origin story using both approximate absolute dates and recalculated dates, as if the universe had been created 13.8 years ago instead of 13.8 billion years ago. This second approach makes it easier to get a sense of the chronological shape of the story. After all, natural selection did not design our minds to cope with millions or bil
lions of years, so this shorter chronology should be easier to grasp.

  Most of the dates given for events that happened more than a few thousand years ago were established only in the past fifty years using modern chronometric technologies, of which the most important is radiometric dating.

  EVENT: THRESHOLD 1: Big bang: origin of our universe

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 13.8 billion years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 13 years, 8 months ago

  EVENT: THRESHOLD 2: The first stars begin to glow

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 13.2 (?) billion years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 13 years, 2 months ago

  EVENT: THRESHOLD 3: New elements forged in dying large stars

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: Continuously from threshold 2 to the present day

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: Continuously from threshold 2 to the present day

  EVENT: THRESHOLD 4: Our sun and solar system form

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 4.5 billion years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 4 years, 6 months ago

  EVENT: THRESHOLD 5: Earliest life on Earth

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 3.8 billion years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 3 years, 9 months ago

  EVENT: The first large organisms on Earth

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 600 million years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 7 months ago

  EVENT: An asteroid wipes out the dinosaurs

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 65 million years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 24 days ago

  EVENT: The hominin lineage splits from the chimp lineage

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 7 million years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 2.5 days ago

  EVENT: Homo erectus

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 2 million years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 17 hours ago

  EVENT: THRESHOLD 6: First evidence of our species, Homo sapiens

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 200,000 years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 100 minutes ago

  EVENT: THRESHOLD 7: End of last ice age, beginning of Holocene, earliest signs of farming

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 10,000 years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 5 minutes ago

  EVENT: First evidence of cities, states, agrarian civilizations

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 5,000 years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 2.5 minutes ago

  EVENT: Roman and Han Empires flourish

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 2,000 years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 1 minute ago

  EVENT: World zones begin to be linked together

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 500 years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 15 seconds ago

  EVENT: THRESHOLD 8: Fossil-fuels revolution begins

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 200 years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 6 seconds ago

  EVENT: The Great Acceleration; humans land on the moon

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 50 years ago

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 1.5 seconds ago

  EVENT: THRESHOLD 9 (?): A sustainable world order?

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 100 years in the future?

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 3 seconds to go

  EVENT: The sun dies

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 4.5 billion years in the future

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 4 years, 6 months to go

  EVENT: The universe fades to darkness; entropy wins

  APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: Gazillions and gazillions of years in the future

  DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: Billions and billions of years from now

  PART I

  Cosmos

  CHAPTER 1

  In the Beginning: Threshold 1

  To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

  —CARL SAGAN, COSMOS

  So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

  In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses

  walking warm

  Out of the whinnying green stable

  On to the fields of praise.

  —DYLAN THOMAS, “FERN HILL”

  Jump-Starting an Origin Story

  Bootstrapping is the impossible task of lifting yourself into the air by pulling really, really hard on your bootstraps. The idea entered computer jargon (booting or rebooting) to describe how computers wake up from the dead and then load instructions telling them what to do next. Literally, of course, bootstrapping is impossible, because to lift something, you need something to provide leverage. “Give me a lever and a place to stand on,” said the Greek philosopher Archimedes, “and I will move the Earth.” But what could possibly leverage the creation of a new universe? How do you bootstrap a universe? Or, for that matter, the origin story that describes how a new universe appeared?

  Bootstrapping origin stories is almost as hard as bootstrapping universes. One possible approach is to vanish the problem of beginnings by assuming the universe was always there. No bootstrapping needed. Many origin stories have gone this way. So have many modern astronomers, including those who supported the steady-state theory in the middle of the twentieth century. This is the idea that at large scales, the universe has always been pretty much as it is today. Similar, but subtly different, is the idea that, yes, there was a moment of creation when great forces or beings roamed the universe making things, but since then, nothing much has changed. The elders of Lake Mungo might have seen the universe like this, describing a world brought to life more or less in its current form by their ancestors. Isaac Newton saw God as the “first cause” of everything and argued that He was present in all of space. That is why Newton thought that the universe as a whole did not change much. The universe, he once wrote, was “the Sensorium of a Being incorporeal, living, and intelligent.”1 Early in the twentieth century, Einstein was so sure the universe was unchanging (at large scales) that he added a special constant to his theory of relativity to make it predict a stable universe.

  Is the idea of an eternal or unchanging universe satisfying? Not really, particularly if you have to smuggle in a creator to kick-start the process, as in “In the beginning there was nothing, then God made…” The logical glitch is obvious, though it has taken some sophisticated minds a long time to see it clearly. At the age of eighteen, Bertrand Russell gave up on the idea of a creator god after reading the following passage in the autobiography of John Stuart Mill: “My father taught me that the question, ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, ‘Who made God?’”2

  And there’s another puzzle. If a god is powerful enough to design a universe, that god must surely be more complex than the universe, so assuming a creator god means explaining a fantastically complex universe by imagining something even more complex that just… created it. Some might think that was cheating.

  The ancient Indian hymns known as the Vedas hedge their bets. “There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond.”3 Perhaps everything arose from a sort of primordial tension between being and nonbeing, a murky realm that was not quite something but could become something. Perhaps, as a modern Australian Aboriginal saying puts it, nothing is entirely nothing.4 It’s a tricky idea, and some might dismiss it as fuzzy and mystical if it didn’t have striking parallels to the modern idea, embedded in quantum physics, that space is never entirely empty but is full of possibilities.

  Is there a sort of ocean of energy or potential from which particular forms emerge like waves or tsunamis? This is such a common concept that it is tempting to think our ideas about ultimate beginnings come from our own experiences. Every morning, we each experience how a conscious world, with shapes, sensations, and structures, seems to emerge from a chaotic unconscious world. Joseph Campbell writes: “As the consciousness of the individual rests on a sea
of night into which it descends in slumber and out of which it mysteriously wakes, so, in the imagery of myth, the universe is precipitated out of, and reposes upon, a timelessness back into which it again dissolves.”5

  But perhaps this is too metaphysical. Maybe the difficulty is logical. Stephen Hawking argues that the question of beginnings is just badly put. If the geometry of space-time is spherical, like the surface of Earth but in more dimensions, then asking what existed before the universe is like looking for a starting point on the surface of a tennis ball. That’s not how it works. There is no edge or beginning to time, just as there is no edge to the surface of Earth.6

  Today, some cosmologists are attracted to another set of concepts that tug us back to the idea of a universe without a beginning or end. Perhaps our universe is part of an infinite multiverse in which new universes keep popping out of big bangs. This could be right, but at present we have no hard evidence for anything before our own, local big bang. It’s as if the creation of our universe was so violent that any information about what it came out of was erased. If there are other cosmological villages, we can’t yet see them.

  Frankly, today we have no better answers to the problem of ultimate beginnings than any earlier human society had. Bootstrapping a universe still looks like a logical and metaphysical paradox. We don’t know what Goldilocks conditions allowed a universe to emerge, and we still can’t explain it any better than novelist Terry Pratchett did when he wrote, “The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.”7

  Threshold 1: Quantum Bootstrapping a Universe

  The bootstrap for today’s most widely accepted account of ultimate origins is the idea of a big bang. This is one of the major paradigms of modern science, like natural selection in biology or plate tectonics in geology.8