So here we are today… all happy, good looking, and put together. Well it took a while for us to get to this point. It happened before our moms and dads decided to have us, before Christopher Columbus came across the pond, and even before our ancient ancestors decided to stand upright! It even happened before what we call Earth gave way to us. This story begins roughly 13.72 billion years ago. And to put that time in perspective you may ask, “well what constitutes as 1 year”? One year is the time it takes light to travel roughly 6 trillion miles. To put this in perspective, light can travel around the earth 7 times in one second. So really 1 year is exactly what you think of it as, and it all began a long, long time ago.

So from how old the universe is one can also notice how BIG it must be too if light has been doing that much traveling! Yes thats right this story is about how you, me, and duprie all came from…well nothing actually! See that is the funny part of this story, it is some fact and simply put, some fiction. No one knows how the very beginning happened, but we know for certain there was a beginning! And this beginning is what we call today “The Big Bang”. Ironically there was no “bang” however, because there is no sound in space.

So there is the hazy beginning…not much detail because there is no real details that are known! But we are here, there is no denying that. So whatever was before the beginning, weather something came from nothing, or there is a god creator, or simply an explanation yet to be discovered and comprehended can only be speculated about at this point. But the next thing that happened is better understood, baryogenesis. If someone ever tells you that you are not perfect you can kindly respond that the universe is not perfect either. For during this time this stuff called matter, which makes up all of us and everything we know, combined with this stuff called antimatter. Now the difference between the two is that when they come in contact they annihilate each other, turning into pure energy! And lucky for us there was 1 more bit of matter for every billion bits of antimatter, thus leaving us with the vast sea of energy and matter that we see today!

The next process is a sudden and dramatic one. From all this residue left over there was one very abundant element that proved to be very stable. It formed from this soup of energy and matter when positive energy protons and negative energy electrons began clinging together. This element is hydrogen, the most abundant and lightest element in the universe then, today, and maybe forever. Gravity, the attractor of all matter, then started doing its work and pulling huge clouds (clouds trillions of times bigger than the ones we are used to) together under its crushing force. Eventually these clouds turned into balls and the atoms in the hydrogen began to fuse. This reaction is called nuclear fusion.

Fusion happens in all stars, and the first ones were huge and burned fast. Like us stars have lives, and although are born in the same way they can die in different ways. Some are crushed under their own gravity so much that they turn into black holes, others smash themselves down into white dwarfs. Both of these are very dense, but the key is when a star is about to die it sheds its outer layers, blasting its star dust out into deep space as it runs out of light elements to fuse. This star dust, now with elements that have been fused into heavier elements than hydrogen (like oxygen, carbon, and iron), are seeded across the cosmos.

We are now on the third generation of stars (i know they grow up so fast    ), and consequently gravity in its relentless pursuit has pulled stars into galaxies. Galaxies are clusters of billions of stars, some large ones even have trillions! So as local stars blew up and our star formed, these heavier elements happened to be floating in the right place at the right time.

Even luckier for us we happened to have a fairly stable star, it still has another 4 billion years of burning. Our planet formed at an ideal place; liquid water seems to be incredibly crucial, and absolute flukes like our moon play almost god like roles in our existence. The story then picks up on earth as single celled life forms able to duplicate themselves eventually evolved into what you look around and see today!!

So the universe, from an unimaginably small and dense point, exploded space, time, and existence…from nothing! So here we are, hydrogen that condensed due to gravity. Then fused from extreme heat and pressure into heavier elements, then exploded in a violent veil of star dust, and again found homage here on earth. All heavier elements are formed from fusion in stars, and we are all star dust feeding off star light. We are not as disconnected from our bubble outside of perfect earth as we think. We consider ourselves alive, and are we not part of the universe? Therefore is a part of the universe not alive?