To Begin With (I)

The universe began 13 billion years ago in the so-called "big bang." The event was less an explosion than an astronomically rapid expansion. The universe expanded from the size of an atom to the size of the present Milky Way in a fraction of a fraction of a second. If one had been looking at this atom from the outside and blinked one's eyes, a realm the size of a galaxy would have appeared before one's eyes.

After about 300,000 years the universe had cooled to the point where matter and energy separated. It was then therefore possible for solids (matter) and radiation (energy) to exist in separate and unitary forms. (free matter and free energy). It was not until about 1 billion years after the "big bang" that the first stars began to form.

The first, most simple, elements in the universe were hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen atoms made up about 74% of all atoms and helium the other 24% in the entire universe. The first stars were simple formations formed by hydrogen and helium matter collapsing in on itself. As the gravitational field of the matter pulled the hydrogen and helium together it created an explosion. In a sense, a star is simply a continuous controlled explosion with the explosion of the collision of the atoms being constantly acted upon by the opposite force of the gravitation pulling the atoms back in on themselves and continuing the controlled explosion outward.

The implosive force created by the gravitational fields of the atoms and the explosive force that created by the collision of the atoms created a chaotic yet stable balance in which a star was born sending out photons of potentially life-giving radiation in all directions.

We can thus perceive that the two basic interactive forces in the universe are the original explosive force of the "big bang" and the implosive forces of the gravitational fields of solid bodies of matter. In this way, the creation of one star is similar to the creation of the entire universe in microcosm. The same basic forces continue to operate to this very moment in the present.

Continuing with more soon....

Here......When the explosive forces of a star are just being born, it gives off debris matter which begin to form orbital patterns around the star. These pieces of matter begin to crash and coalesce into large chunks of rock. Some of these bodies generally, eventually become planets.

In the beginning of a planets life there is usually a large amount of gaseous matter forming the bulk of the planet. Young suns give off solar winds. These winds blow off the gassy excesses of the inner planets but those winds do not reach out to the outer planets. Therefore, the inner planets of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars became rocky. Gaseous atmospheres were blown away. The outer planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were too far out from the solar winds for their gaseous atmospheres to be blown away. So, they are now huge gas balls with a small, hard inner core. Pluto is a rocky planetoid (formerly considered a planet) In that far orbit out with Pluto there are thousands of planetoids that lazily orbit the sun, some of which are bigger than Pluto.

Getting now to Earth, the first life on Earth were called Prokaryotes. These were one-celled organisms with no nucleus that could hardly even move. They did not come into being until 3.8 billion years ago. That is roughly a billion years after the beginning of Earth.

More soon...........