When, and if, you chance upon this essay, and you decide its worth a read, the first impression, rather two impressions, and the right ones, bang on, you are sure to gather, are: this guy has idle time on his hands and, he is no original................I (that's you) have read this piece somewhere.
Of course, you have! But its my way of putting ideas important to me!!
Most odd ball inspirations come sitting on our throne..........wastage out from down there, and fresh ideas flow in up there..........now, that is original!
I began thinking, how many probabilities and improbabilities, and these are infinite, make up for our existence on this rock? There are so many "if this had not to happen" and "what if this had happened" that we are left wondering how the hell are we here at all!!
Lets try and list some of the what ifs.
What if the Big Bang, or whatever caused all this Universe getting created, had not taken off? Nothing, absolutely nothing would have been here, not me, not you, not this laptop, no birds and bees......yes, yes I will stop here. Maybe, there would have been some other type of everything...........ask those clever physicists.
They tell us that all the millions of Galaxies in the Universe are moving away from one another.............they have concluded this by the red shift, the spectrum of light coming from all these bodies out there; it indicates everything is moving away from our galaxy, hence by physics analogy, every galaxy is moving away from every other galaxy!
For now, this was good.........our Solar System, and billions of other systems had ample "breathing" space, hence planets formed around stars. But billions of years from now its going to be pretty lonely..............we won't be around to see that...........the entire Universe is going to disperse into oblivion.......billions of galaxies will be infinitely distanced from one another..........what an awesome thought! (And here we, petty petty piece of nothings, are trying to match wits with one another.)......
I have just seen a very informative, and not very pleasant, documentary on History channel (3/Dec/2008) with astronomers prediction that our Milky Way galaxy is on a collision course with the neighbouring galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy......if our huge spiral side of our galaxy where our Solar System is located remains outside the collision, we will witness astronomical fireworks that may last a million years!!!
This Earth is estimated to be five billion years old...........does this include the billion years it was in some dust and gaseous state, slowly solidifying into a rock? (the outer crust we live on; otherwise, below the crust is a fiery ball of fire!)
The Universe is variously calculated a 13 billion to 15 billion years, our Star, the Sun, should be around of a much younger age, because the old blokes have lived out their full life, become huge monsters and then collapsed by the awesome force of their own gravity, become Black Holes......Black Holes, one is at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, (estimated to be a million times bigger than the Sun, sucks in everything that comes near, even light is absorbed..............gluttons of the Universe!
So our tiny Solar System is lucky it remains "unscathed" so far!!!
Now here goes, if the Earth had not solidified to its present state, not formed the atmosphere needed for life to sustain itself, this happened by a torrential rain that lasted some 70,000 years, life as we know it, again impossible............anyhow life would have evolved someplace else; in any case, scientists conjecture, life, several million times over, is replicating in other parts of the Universe.
There are some conflicting theories on how life formed, and physicists in particular thrive on this; life came from meteors that crashed into Earth, these bringing bacteria and building blocks of life from deep Space. No, others differ, life was accidentally formed from the soup of chemicals in our oceans that churned out the right mix of building blocks that form life.
Are there any other theories? I can't think of any right now, no wait.........I think I had read somewhere, bolts of lightening flashing across the skies triggered life formation in the oceans. One of these or
some other, not yet postulated, formed life.
Perhaps there is most likely some Force, some Energy, a Supreme Intelligence, not the God we conjecture and imagine we are made in His image, but a Force with an infinite Intelligence...........how else can you explain the pattern in everything..............the atomic structure in everything, the atoms are an universe within itself........zillions of Universe, each atom with protons electrons neutrons and the smallest particle, the Quark.............my apologies, if more infinitely smaller particles have been discovered...............I don't know.........I feel like an illiterate who has only learned to sign my name yesterday!
But I have heard of the String Theory, all things in the Universe are "connected" by an infinite infinite number of strings, smaller than the atom(?) that holds things together, read Stephen Hawkinns "A Brief History of Time."
Look at the pattern...........this Earth revolves around the Sun, is at the exact optimal distance that keeps the right atmosphere etc in place for billions of years, billions of years............sorry, no amount of persuasion from physicists that a number of clever mathematical formulae explain this and many other things.............ok, a huge number of formulae..........but how and where did these formulae, perfect explanation for everything, spring from? A Nature without intelligence or a Force hidden behind Nature that provides this intelligent pattern.
Look further at this pattern of all things..........all species mate within their species, every specie has its own DNA structure and set of instructions ...........a cow's DNA structure is not going to accidentally produce a human............but the DNA instructions will make you look a little like your father and mother!
or, a DNA structure with instructions for your nose is not going to "build" your ear...............look at the heart, it has DNA instructions, giving the heart's "battery," the small Bundle-Recording above the heart, to give out electric currents to beat the heart ceaselessly for the life span of the owner......amazing!
Its the same pattern, the same infinite number of events and coincidences or patterns that got the human race going ...................from remote hominids, around four million years ago, who from the neccessity to stand upright to observe danger better........ started our species! Vertebrae, those series of bones running down the central back part of the body, had evolved for some million years, enabled life to walk on fours, and then, our hominid ancestor, on two......legs!
And millions of years before this, in a one in a million rare event, a huge meteor, crashing into the Earth, "destroyed" those egg laying dinosaurs...........in fact, scientist tell us, dinosaurs never died out, but evolved over millions of years into birds! (When you eat chicken, remember its ancestor was probably a specie of dinosaur!)
In the meantime, species, that "grow" their off springs in a womb within their body, the mammals, unlike through eggs that incubate the offspring outside the body, got preponderance, with the big bully dinosaurs out; and these, the mammals, began to do better in the game of evolution.
Some of these mammal species began to use their hands and fingers, one of the first things.....to hold their bodies from falling, these mammals held tree branches with their limbs, thus giving an impetus for the brain to "grow." These were the ancestors of the ape family of which we humans are a branch. (If these ancestors, of hominids, were to have stretched their necks to reach out for food-berries etc, growing on trees, we would probably have evolved into an animal with long necks and a small head with a small brain!
With more flexible fingers, and hands, these early apes began to hold foods in their hands, eating, by transferring foodstuff into their mouths held in a grip in their fingers.............this "tool, our hands and fingers," got more agile only by an increased brain capacity.
And with better food intake, the bodies of some of the ape species grew larger..........at this point, for reasons still not understood, one branch of apes separated from the other, and the ancestor of hominids began to evolve............a specie of more intelligent ape that used more small rocks to break open nuts etc...........and easily from there, the descendant of these apes, the hominids, began to "flake' these stones to form tools, their brain capacity growing larger, the forehead gradually standing higher to enable enclosure of a larger brain.
It took a few million years for the early hominids- the Ramapethicus, the Homo-Habilis, and many other branch descendants of hominids, to evolve into ancestor of Man, the Homo Sapien Sapien....................even here, great competition for space, and what else, took place between the Neanderthals (one descendant branch of later hominids or early humans) and the Homo Sapiens Sapiens (that's us)............with the latter winning out!!
A further quirk of evolution, more recent, humans branched into several races, the Caucasoid, the Mongoloid, the Brown, the Negroid (the last probably the oldest.)
And one spark, one spark accidentally produced from friction of flints, caused man to make his own fire..........the world's greatest ever invention!! and the seeds of civilisation..........domesticating the first wild seeds and shifting out from caves to the first simple structures..............burying the dead or exposure (cremation), domesticating goats first(?) then cattle........
No comments:
Post a Comment