In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are, and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is a vacuum, an emptiness, and a most disquieting loneliness. Alex Haley, Roots

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes

The realities of nature surpass our most ambitious dreams. Rodin

We are all astronauts. As we sail on through an immense sea of seemingly indifferent space, as we work and play, experience success and defeat, happiness and sadness, as the trials and tribulations of humankind are carried out on this little bluish ball, we fail to recognize for the most part our cosmic setting. Consider the unheralded fact that it is impossible for any of us to go home again to an exact mathematical spatial point of our childhoods. Some time ago I returned to where I lived as a child, to Southern California, a town called Garden Grove about five miles from the original Disneyland. I sought out and found my old street and house.

Nuclear physicists estimate that approximately 4 million tons of the Sun's nuclear fuel are consumed every second to produce the energy stream that allows for life on Earth.  This energy output is equivalent to most of the world's electrical energy production multiplied by a million years, and the process has been ongoing for about 5 billion years and will continue for at least another 4 billion years.⁴

As important as this star is to us, it is simply a grain of sand in an enormous sea of stars and galaxies. It is important to reflect that the next nearest star to us is about 300,000 times more distant than our Sun. Our Sun is part of a single galaxy of stars. Within our galaxy there may be up to 400 billion stars. Although our Sun is a little above average in terms of size, temperature, and brightness, it is still often referred to as a yellow dwarf star. Although a million Earths could fit within the Sun, the supergiant star Mu Cephi could hold a billion Suns!

We have sent our spacecraft out into this colossal cosmic neighborhood, but it will be a very long time before they travel very far. Pioneer 10 is such a spacecraft. Launched in March of 1972 and traveling now at a little over 7 miles per second (25,000 miles per hour), it did not cross the orbit of the outermost planet of our solar system until June 1983, and it will not reach the vicinity of a relatively close star for 33,000 years.⁵ Since this star is moving towards us at a very rapid closing speed, Pioneer's journey is shortened by over 200,000 years. The little spacecraft was designed to last for only two years, but it was still transmitting information back to Earth in March of 1996 when funds were finally cut off to monitor its signals.

Talking about large astronomical distances in terms of miles or kilometers is very inconvenient. The distances between cosmological structures like stars and galaxies are more easily judged by using the standard of a light year, the distance light travels in one year. At about 186,000 miles per second, 670 million miles per hour, or 16 billion miles in one day, a single light year is equal to 6 trillion miles. The distance then from the Earth to the nearest star is about 4 light years.⁶

With the flights of Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2 in the 1970s, we explored some of the objects within our solar system backyard. Launched in the Fall of 1977, Voyager 1 arrived at Jupiter in March of 1979, about a half billion miles from the Sun and a little over 400 million miles from the Earth. This year-and-a-half journey was a marvelous technological achievement, but what human technology accomplished in a year and a half, nature accomplishes in about 36 minutes at the speed of light. Voyager then traveled to Saturn, a distance of almost a billion miles from the Sun. It arrived in November of 1980, and then left our solar system. Voyager 2 followed a different path, arriving at Jupiter in July of 1979, Saturn in August of 1981, Uranus in January 1986, a distance of about 1.8 billion miles, and Neptune in 1989, a distance of 2.8 billion miles. Voyager required 12 years to accomplish this journey, even though it travelled at about 60,000 miles per hour. A beam of light would require only the time between your breakfast and lunch.

Jupiter is the largest of all the planets. Over 1,000 Earths could fit within its volume. After the Voyager flights planetary scientists had theorized that this gigantic world has no solid surface, but that deep beneath its frigid ammonia clouds there is an enormous ocean of hydrogen and, very deep and under enormous pressure, a core of liquid metallic hydrogen. On December 7, 1995 a probe from the Galileo spacecraft plummeted into Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere. Lasting for only about an hour before the probe was crushed and melted by the tremendous pressure and temperature, it sent back data to the orbiting Galileo mother ship that humbled scientists who expected to find more water in the cloud tops and some evidence to confirm their theory of the planet's formation.

The four, historically important, Galilean moons of Jupiter -- Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede -- so called because they were discovered by Galileo in 1609, were surveyed for the first time by the Voyager flights.

In many ways the meandering path of our understanding is like a enduring but somewhat turbulent romance where each idea is a gesture to the universe for acceptance . . . . But why we seek to understand is no mystery. It is as natural for our species as love.

Europa, the brightest of the Galilean moons, is about the size of the Earth's Moon, but unlike our Moon its surface shows few impact craters. Instead the surface appears completely covered with ice and mobile ice sheets, implying a very active surface environment. Although water volcanoes have not been observed yet, planetary scientists believe that such volcanoes probably exist on Europa, spewing into space pressurized water from a possible huge underground ocean that freezes and then falls back to the surface, in the process erasing any craters.

Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, is larger than the planet Mercury and 40% larger than our Moon. Ganymede is the only moon known to have a magnetic field. Density measurements also indicate a large amount of water or ice as a basic constituent. Could it also have a large underground ocean?

These possibilities have fired the speculative imagination of many scientists. Could there be some form of life in these oceans? What would it be like? Recently, biologists have realized that life is much more tenacious than previously thought. Biologists specializing in deep life have discovered bacteria living up to five miles within the Earth's crust, some thermophiles (heat lovers) such as Bacillus infernus can survive temperatures over 165 degrees F (74 degrees C), and we now know that very large, and very strange, worm-like creatures live around hot vents at great dark depths in the Earth's ocean. Far from the energizing rays of light from the Sun, the worm-like creatures, called Riftia, grow to several feet in length, but have no mouth, gut, or anus. The discovery of these creatures surprised biologists, because the hot waters emanating from these vents evidently supply the energy to sustain a food chain that does not rely on the energy from the Sun as does most life on Earth. In Riftia's case, it feeds off the productivity of an enormous number of bacteria that live inside its body! Given that the hot rocky centers of Europa and Ganymede, plus the gravitational flexing caused by Jupiter, would supply abundant heat, similar life could exist under the thick ice crusts of these moons.⁷

The fourth Galilean moon is Callisto, the most heavily cratered object in the solar system. Unlike Io and Europa, which seem to have recovered from the meteoric bombardment that scientists believe was part of our solar system's creation billions of years ago, like the Earth's Moon, Callisto remains scarred and wounded with thousands of craters. Its surface has probably changed little in the last 4 billion years. Although to a far lesser extent, such bombardments continue to this day throughout our solar system. Not far from Winslow, Arizona is the mile wide, over two hundred yards deep, Meteor Crater, a result of a relatively small asteroid collision with the Earth 50,000 years ago. The force of the impact was equivalent to a 15-megaton nuclear explosion. In July 1994, several pieces of a disintegrating comet, that would have easily destroyed all life on Earth, slammed into Jupiter with a force estimated at 40 million megatons, 500 times more explosive power than all the world's nuclear weapons at the time. Callisto and our Moon remind us not only of our solar system's violent past, but also of our unpredictable future.

When Voyager 2 encountered Uranus, it discovered on the moons some of the strangest geological features known in the solar system, and a possible gigantic 5,000 mile deep ocean of water mixed with ammonia on the planet itself. On the moon Oberon is a mountain that is at least 12 1/2 miles high, over twice the height of Mt. Everest. Miranda's geology is so strange, planetary scientists speculate that like a Humpty Dumpty that was fortunate to be put back together again, it was blasted apart in the past by a cataclysmic impact with an object about half its size and then was reformed ("reaccreted") by gravity. Uranus itself is tipped on its side, such that its north and south poles face the Sun like a large bull's eye at different times during a Uranus year.

After Neptune, Voyager 2's next milestone will be the star Sirius. Although the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere and relatively close to Earth (14 light years), Voyager will require some 350,000 years to reach the vicinity of this star, passing within several trillion miles. It is time too for us to leave our backyard. The 3.7 billion miles to Pluto, the furthest planet from the Sun,⁸ is just a speck of space within our galaxy, the distance light travels between breakfast and lunch.

Great nebulae such as the Eta Carina nebula abound throughout our galaxy. Astronomers use the word nebula, from the Sanskrit "nabhas" meaning cloud, to refer to both places where stars are born and the remnants of the death throes of a star. Some stars like our Sun die by gas expansion, like sloughing off skin, and become dense white dwarf stars. The death of a larger star is marked by a cataclysmic explosion and is called a supernova.⁹

The word nova (from the Latin "novus" meaning new) indicates that early observers of the universe thought these objects were new stars. Some stars are so massive -- Mu Cephi is larger than half our entire solar system -- and erupt upon their deaths so violently that they appear from Earth as if a bright star has emerged from nowhere. The past death of a star in our cosmic neighborhood was absolutely essential to life as we know it, because the basic atomic elements necessary for life are created in the interior of large stars. Without large explosive stars there would be no gold to kindle humankind's greed, iron to build our steel civilization, no carbon to form the basic building blocks of life and to generate our fossil fuels, and no oxygen to breathe. Just as the universe has experienced a structural evolution (the formation of galaxies and gradual expansion of the universe), and at least one form of biological and cultural evolution (on Earth), the universe has also undergone a chemical evolution. During the formative years of the universe only the elements hydrogen and helium existed.¹⁰ Over a period of billions of years the nuclear processes that take place in stars have converted hydrogen to heavier elements, and these heavier elements to still heavier elements. When these stars explode they seed the universe with the chemical elements. Our Sun is at least a second-, and perhaps a third-generation star. In our vicinity other stars previously existed. Their violent deaths made our lives possible.

Astrophysicists now believe that most galaxies have massive black holes at their centers.  The black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy appears to have an equivalent mass of 4 million suns.  Lucky for us that our Earth-Sun system is about 27,000 light years from the galactic center.

The Crab Nebula is a very famous example of a supernova remnant. In A.D. 1054 the original supernova was recorded by the Chinese, Arabs, and the American Indians. In spite of being over 40,000 trillion miles from Earth, for the first few months it was so bright that a person could read by it at night and it was visible during the day for 23 days. Since the nebula is over 7,000 light years from Earth, what we are looking at now occurred around 5,000 B.C. The explosion is still expanding at a rate of almost a thousand miles per second. Any planet that might have existed within a solar system vicinity (billions of miles) at the time of the initial explosion would have been entirely vaporized. Any planet within a few light years would have been completely sterilized.¹¹ At the center of this explosion is a neutron star spinning around 30 times a second. Astronomers refer to such a spinning neutron star as a pulsar, because we receive very precise pulses of radiation as the star spins its dizzy existence around its axis. So precise and regular is this radiation that when first detected by radio telescopes on Earth, it was thought that we were receiving a message from an intelligent extraterrestrial neighbor.

All that we have surveyed thus far, occurs within our galaxy, one galaxy out of billions, another grain of sand. If we were able to leave our galaxy, and travel a few million light years away and look back, astronomers believe we would see something similar to Figure 1-7. This is one of our closest major galactic neighbors, the Andromeda galaxy. It is 2.2 million light years away, a mere 13,200,000,000,000,000,000 miles. What we are seeing now is in a very real sense fossilized light. We are seeing the past, what this galaxy looked like about the same time that our evolutionary ancestor, Homo Erectus, walked through the grass lands of Africa. Spiked points of light visible on the picture frame are stars from our galaxy as we look through it. If this were a picture of our galaxy, our Sun and Earth would be located on the inner edge of one of the outermost visible spiral arms. Our galaxy is a spiral galaxy similar to Andromeda. It is approximately 80 thousand light years in diameter, and even though we are spinning around this galactic merry-go-round at over 500,000 miles per hour, it will take 250 million years to complete one revolution. Some galaxies spin their stars at an even faster rate, over a million miles per hour.  For a brief movie that that shows where our Earth is in our galaxy, click here.

Just as people and stars are different, so are galaxies. There are dwarf elliptical, giant elliptical, globular, spiral, and irregular galaxies. Figure 1-8 shows the charming Sombrero galaxy. In 1990 astronomers discovered Abell 2029, a galaxy 60 times the size of our galaxy, containing up to 100 trillion stars, and 6 million light years in diameter.

If we could travel further out into the universe, looking back we would begin to see clusters of galaxies. The Virgo cluster, a group of over 2,500 galaxies, is about 50 million light years from Earth. It stretches 20 million light years in diameter, and is the closest to what astronomers refer to as the Local Group, the cluster of galaxies in which our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are located.

No matter how preoccupied we are with more practical matters on our little planet, every human being must at some time or another confront profound philosophical questions, questions impossible to ask without deeply felt emotion. Why does all this exist? Why are we a part of it? If we are honest with ourselves, is there any philosophy or religion completely consistent with such a perspective? Such an insignificant speck that we occupy, such an enormous extension of time compared to our fleeting existence -- yet we have been able to figure it out. We occupy such a small place, but we are capable of being aware that it is a small place. Imagine a small, intelligent insect in a small isolated forest, that lives for only a few days and whose species is only a few hundred years old, but that nevertheless has been able to indirectly figure out the size and age of the Earth, that it consists of mountains, rivers, continents, oceans, cities and people. Imagine such an insect that has not, and perhaps cannot, travel to these other places, but has expanded its little mind using an indirect process of observation and reasoning to encompass these realities nevertheless. In many ways we are this creature.

According to Albert Einstein, this is the greatest cosmological mystery: Not our knowledge of the universe, but why and how do we know it? Today some scientists believe that we are very close to knowing the basic details of the origin of the entire universe. What does this mean in terms of who we are? Are there other forms of life capable of this awareness? Are there other kinds of awareness? Does the universe have a purpose? Are we an important part of this purpose? What is the universe for?

As we address these questions, we will see that the intellectual evolution of our present understanding is as fascinating as its results. In many ways the meandering path of our understanding is like an enduring but somewhat turbulent romance where each idea is a gesture to the universe for acceptance. Before we can discover anything, we must have an idea of what we are looking for. How we pick the right idea at the right time puzzled Einstein all his life, and much of this book will address this question. But why we seek to understand is no mystery. It is as natural for our species as love.

Before we address such questions, we must note that our introductory story is only half told. We have only gone in one direction. The size of a printed letter on this page is about 10 billion times smaller than the Earth. Yet, a printed letter is 10 billion times larger than an atom and 100 billion times larger than a neutrino. There is a universe in any direction that we look, an infinite texture to every object.

There are insects small enough to fly through window screens of the best kept houses and breed in drains of bathtubs and sinks. To something small enough, the cracks in an egg are like a grand canyon.

Another insect that we have unsuccessfully tried to eliminate with powerful poisons is the termite. It is somewhat fitting, however, that insects have their own insect problems. Figure 1-14 shows a mite on the neck of a termite. If you look very carefully, you can just make out some bacteria in the upper right hand corner. A bacterium is so small (.000039 of an inch long, less than half this distance wide) that a swim across a drop of sweat for one would be roughly the same as having a human being swim across the English Channel. Billions of bacteria make each of our bodies their home, their planet. There are more bacteria on each of our bodies than there are people in the world. Every time we take a hot shower we attempt a little genocide, but within a few hours those that survive will have reproduced to their original numbers. Human beings are even egotistical about their body odor. We think that it is "our" bodies that smell after we have not taken a bath or shower for awhile. Actually, it is the gases emitted from the bacteria that have greatly increased in number. Bacteria have been on this planet for at least 3 1/2 billion years and they are not about to leave. They can survive extremely high temperatures and live deep within the Earth's crust without oxygen or sun-light.

It is important to realize that life on this planet has spent about three-quarters of its existence in single-celled form, and even today the majority of organisms still exist as single cells. The evolutionary pressure to become complex is evidently not very great.  Gerald Feinberg and Robert Shapiro

Insects and bacteria are huge compared to the microcosmic spaces routinely discussed by physicists. Pictured only by the language of mathematics, physicists are able to investigate spaces called quantum vacuums filled with "virtual" particles, objects which do not deserve the name "object" because they both exist and do not exist. In every material object there is another universe. All material objects and all life forms consist of mostly empty space. Material objects consist of crystals and atoms. All living things consist of cells, molecules, and atoms. Although it is impossible to picture what an atom looks like,¹⁴ to at least have a vague idea of the relative sizes of its parts, imagine if we could blow up the size of an ordinary hydrogen atom to the size of the Earth. The nucleus of the atom would be about the size of a basketball located in the center of the Earth, and in the outermost portion of the Earth's atmosphere we would find an electron, smaller than the smallest cherry. If the nucleus was the size of our Sun, then the size of the atom would be 20 times larger than our solar system, about 70 billion miles in diameter. The nucleus of an atom represents but a mere trillionth of the atom's volume. An electron is about 1,000 times smaller in mass than a proton, a particle that makes up the nucleus of an atom. Thus, atoms are almost entirely empty space, and remember, billions of atoms can fit within the space of a single printed letter.
 

If the universe has evolved over a period of approximately 14 billion years, then the Earth and our Sun are relative new arrivals on the cosmic scene, being only about 5 billion years old. Life began on Earth shortly after its formation (4 billion years ago), but complex, multicellular forms of life with bilateral body plans did not begin until about 600 million years ago.  Shortly after in geological time, complex life flowered during a period of time geologists call the Cambrian explosion. Some of the first land animals were insect creatures of which the millipedes and centipedes are representative (450 million years ago). We know from the fossil record that some of these first millipedes were up to six feet long! Some other noteworthy developments were flies and cockroaches (300 million years), the dinosaurs (200 to 60 million years), dolphins (30 million years), the immediate ancestors to the human species (3 million), modern humans (200-100 thousand years), the first technological achievements by humankind (10,000 years), and our modern technological lifestyle from the industrial revolution to the present (200 years).

The time scales with which we are familiar in our every day existence are so different from what these numbers represent that it is very difficult to comprehend the significance of such enormous times. To better understand this, scientists make use of an analogy, a cosmic calendar where every second in the calendar corresponds to 475 normal years, a day to over 41 million normal years, and every 24 calendar days is equal to a billion normal years. In this way the entire 14 billion years of cosmic development can be shortened into a single calendar year. Some important dates would look like this:

 
Origin of the universe -- January 1st

Origin of our galaxy -- May 1st

Origin of our Solar System -- Early September

Formation of the Earth -- Middle September

Life on Earth -- Late September

Sexual Reproduction by microorganisms -- November 1st

Oxygen Atmosphere -- December 1st

Cambrian Explosion (600 to 500 million years ago when most complex organisms appeared, trilobites, first fish) -- Middle December

Land plants and first insects (millipedes) -- December 19, 20

First amphibians -- December 22

First reptiles and trees -- December 23

First dinosaurs -- December 25

Dinosaur extinction, rise of mammals, first birds, flowers -- December 28

First primates (monkey-like creatures) -- December 30

Australopithicenes (Lucy, etc.) -- 10:00 p.m., December 31

Homo Habilis -- 11:00 p.m., December 31

Homo Erectus -- 11:15 p.m., December 31

Early Homo Sapiens---11:53 p.m., December 31

Neandertals -- 11:56 p.m., December 31

Homo Sapiens Sapiens -- 11:56:30 p.m., December 31

Ancient Greeks to present -- last five seconds

Average human life span -- a little over one-tenth of a second

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepar- ed to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall be nothing. T.H. Huxley

The most scientifically supported view today of the origin of the universe is known as the Big Bang theory. At time zero nothing existed but a point, a singularity. Not a point "in" space and time, but only a one-dimensional point. Space and time were inside the point! Do not try to imagine this; your mind will not let you create an internal picture of it -- it can only be described mathematically. From this point space, time and energy emerged.

At 10^-43 seconds,¹⁵ what physicists call the Planck time, the temperature of this energy was 100 thousand billion billion billion degrees. At this time the separate forces of nature did not exist, such as the gravitational force which holds us to our spinning Earth, or the electromagnetic force responsible for magnetic repulsion and attraction, or what is called the strong force, responsible for keeping the nucleus of an atom together, or the weak force responsible for atomic radiation. At this time, only a single, unified superforce existed. At 10^-35 seconds, the temperature cooled enough to "freeze out" the separate identities of the strong and electroweak forces, the latter being a unified state of the electromagnetic and weak forces. At 10^-11, 100 billionths of a second, the identities of the electromagnetic and weak forces emerged.  Prior to 10^-6 seconds, the temperature was still too hot for individual subatomic particles to exist, such as protons, electrons, and neutrons. There were only the puzzling, forever invisible and inseparable, quarks. At about three minutes the temperature finally cooled enough for subatomic particles to form, but even after 350,000 years there were no neutral atoms, only loose nuclei and individual electrons. Once neutral atoms finally formed, mostly hydrogen and a little helium existed. The rest is a history of structural and chemical evolution. As the universe expanded, galaxies and the stars within them formed.

Amazingly, all the objects we can see with our telescopes, all these stars and galaxies, are now estimated to make up only about 5% of the universe.  The rest (23% dark matter and 72% dark energy), the effects of which can be detected, cannot be seen . . . . many billions of years from now, the universe will die a cold, lonely death. There will be no light and no heat anywhere.

We are living in the midst of an explosion, luckily in a relatively mild, somewhat frozen, period. We can measure the current temperature of this explosion by detecting a faint radio whisper with our radio telescopes, view it backwards 14 billion years with our optical telescopes, and even calculate its rate of expansion. Its temperature is 3 degrees Kelvin (3 degrees above absolute zero or -454 degrees F), and its expansion is estimated to be 10¹⁹ cubic light years per day, such that the distance between any pair of galaxies will double every 10 billion years or so.¹⁶

Astrophysicists now believe that this expansion is accelerating and will go on forever, due to a mysterious force called dark energy.  Amazingly, all the objects we can see with our telescopes, all these stars and galaxies, are now estimated to make up only about 5% of the universe.  The rest (23% dark matter and 72% dark energy), the effects of which can be detected, cannot be seen.  So, eventually from any point in space no galaxies or stars would be visible. Finally, many billions of years from now, the universe will die a cold, lonely death. There will be no light and no heat anywhere.

It all sounds like a grand made up myth. We have discovered, however, that the truth is much more fantastic than our most imaginative myths. It is also very serious business with billions of dollars spent each year by competing countries and teams of scientists to unravel the smallest details of nature's secrets, especially as to what occurred in the first fraction of a second 14 billion years ago. The European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland, is a place were childlike fascinations with ordinary objects are expressed in grown-up serious form. This physics laboratory is the size of a small city, cost billions of dollars, and has a staff of over 3,000. Here 2,000 physicists play with the microcosmos.

About 100 of these scientists are a special breed. Their colleagues call them theorists. These men and women may be some of the happiest people in the world. They get paid fairly good salaries to spend their waking moments doing nothing but mathematical speculation and deduction. For many it is a passionate obsession that never ends. Formally, their work is done with complex supercomputers, but it is often also done on the back of cocktail napkins, and in their dreams. For students struggling to get through their first algebra class, it is probably very difficult to imagine that such activity can be meaningful and fun. But for these men and women, following an ancient tradition that began with the Greeks, mathematics is the key to unveiling the secrets of the universe, and they dream of Nobel Prizes and some, following another tradition popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of being the first to read the mathematical mind of God.

The Nobel Prizes, however, sometimes go to the physicist-administrator.¹⁷ So large and complex is the experimental machinery used here to probe nature's secrets, that it also takes a special breed of human being to manage it all. At CERN there is a Super Proton Synchrotron, 4.2 miles in circumference, where matter and anti-matter are made to smash into each other, a Large Electron-Positron collider 17 miles in circumference; and numerous support facilities -- all for the purpose of unlocking the fossil relics of ordinary physical matter. Throughout the world, in many other city-like laboratories, there are other physicists competing earnestly with those at CERN -- at TRISTRAN in Japan and HERA in Germany, to name but a few.  At CERN a major construction project is underway of a new collider -- the Large Hadron Collider.  When finished in 2009 astrophysicists hope to be able to create conditions similar to mini-microseconds after the beginning of the universe and detect what some have called the God particle, technically the Higgs particle, and confirm fundamental theories of the Big Bang.

Although the United States had the Tevatron collider at Fermilab, in Illinois (shut down in 2011), a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven in New York, and the Stanford Linear Collider in California, it is worth noting that in the 1980s American physicists proposed, and the government began to fund, a Superconducting Super Collider. At a cost of $11 billion, it was nicknamed the Desertron, because it was planned to be so big it would need to be built in a desert. At a circumference of 54 miles, construction began in Warahachie, Texas. After spending $2 billion and the construction of huge underground tunnels, the project was canceled by a budget-cutting Congress in 1993. The Super Collider purportedly would have been able to mimic experimentally the conditions of the early universe to within a thousand of a millionth of a millionth of a second from time zero.

. . . an informed appraisal of life absolutely require(s) a full understanding of life’s arena – the universe . . . . By deepening our understanding of the true nature of physical reality, we profoundly reconfigure our sense of ourselves and our experience of the universe.  Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos

 Is the spending of billions of dollars to know what happened at the beginning of the universe 14 billion years ago evidence of our unique intelligence or our madness? Do we really need to know what happened when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old? Why spend billions of dollars on space exploration and massive machines to find out what matter does under conditions similar to the first stages of the universe when we have so many urgent immediate problems. One-fourth of the U.S. population and three-fourths of the world population live without their basic needs being met. Our environment is dangerously polluted and we still have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over. Ethnic conflicts and terrorists attacks proliferate around the globe and military scientists study how to make biological weapons. Should not our more immediate concerns be primarily social, economic, and political?

The answer to this question is very long. In fact this entire book is an answer to this question. In the end we will argue that the ancient Greek philosophers were right: A rational connection exits, though not a purely logical one, between knowledge and the good life, both on the individual level and the social and political as well. We will try to show that an understanding of our cosmological, biological, cultural and philosophical roots is a necessary condition for understanding ourselves and making crucial choices affecting the future of the human race. The human species is at a crucial crossroad, and understanding our cosmic setting is a critical variable in our struggle for survival.

The ancient Greeks believed that all knowledge was interrelated and valuable. Some people are often cynically amused upon reading that someone has just received a Ph.D. for studying what happens to drops of water when they strike the surface of a pool. Those with the appropriate scientific background know, however, that such research has applications for the design and analysis of turbines, cooling towers, steam generators in nuclear reactors, and many chemical processes. Or, we might find many nonscientists laughing and shaking their heads when they pick up the newspaper and find that there is an international meeting of scientists, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on “The Biodiversity in Mud and Dirt.”  But little do these people realize that subsurface creatures (bacteria, fungi, mites, earth-worms, and one-celled organisms) provide the balance of essential elements (carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus) and distribute water and remove wastes, activities without which above ground life (plants, animals, and humans) could not live.  Furthermore, many people will roll their eyes at any discussion of Einstein's general theory of relativity, wondering why any one should care about black holes, the origin of the universe, the slowing of time, and warped space.  Yet, they will happily use and depend on their GPS navigation systems in their cars and cell phones produced in large part by applying Einstein's theory.

Man differs from the animal only a little; most men throw that little away. Confucius

The telescopes on Mauna Kea, noted at the beginning of this chapter, not only can peer backwards in time to see galaxies 13 billion years old and study black holes, including one in the center of our galaxy.  Some of these telescopes can detect asteroids that could threaten our planet and some can scan the Sun and warn us of magnetic storms that fry our satellites' electronics and cause massive power outages on Earth.  By 2004 astronomical activity contributed $150 million to the State of Hawaii in economic and technological development and produced 600 jobs.

Most important for the focus of this book, however, is what might be called philosophical and psychological spin-off. That human beings have progressed materially is not doubted by even the most severe critics of science and technology. Questioned is whether a scientific approach to life has made us better as individuals and as a society. Do new technological feats benefit the poor or only the rich? Have human beings made significant moral progress or have the tools of manipulation, exploitation, and control just become more sophisticated? Is our potential for awareness, of "figuring things out," an asset, or an evolutionary mistake, a dead end? Does scientific knowledge make life simpler or dangerously more complicated? Is the technological-scientific culture that is sweeping the globe just another form of cultural imperialism? Is scientific objectivity actually a grand myth and science only a male-oriented interface with nature; only one of many possible interfaces, and a rather unhealthy one at that based on dominance and exploitation?

"We are hit by tons of material every day, but it is all dust. We are all walking around with comet dust in our hair." Don Yeomans

Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against a bastion and citadel of the stars.  Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Because we are living at a relatively mellow time cosmologically and geologically, the majority of the people on our planet ignore, forget, or are ignorant of our true cosmic setting . . . we fail to realize our common interest as all citizens of a very fragile, temporary little piece of paradise.

An old Humphrey Bogart movie illustrates the essential point.  In The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Bogart plays a man down on his luck who eventually links up with a couple of similarly inclined cohorts who just happen to finally strike it rich prospecting for gold in the dry foothills of Mexico's Sierra Madre. By finding so much gold they then have to worry about how to keep their claim protected and how to move the gold and turn it into cash without revealing their secret. They also become challenged by a feverish greed that begins to envelope each of them.  Their cooperation becomes tenuous and their suspicions of each other intensify as the gold and their potential wealth accumulate.

One day one of the men must make the dangerous journey to the nearest town for supplies. Being an ethnic stranger in a Mexican town, he will obviously attract attention. There are bandits everywhere and it would be easy for someone to follow him back to their gold. Ironically, his biggest problem when he gets to town is that another U.S. citizen is already there. This man naturally expects a reaction of companionship, and is surprised by the partner's aloofness. The partner hurriedly gets his supplies and leaves town, and in spite of his attempts to avoid being followed, the stranger manages to find their camp.

The stranger was interested in the companionship of someone of his own culture in a distant lonely land and a little gold, but he knows his life is at stake. He pleads with the three men to take him in as a partner. There is plenty of gold for all, and an extra gun could be handy in this unfriendly place. A decision has to be made. The stranger is disarmed and the original partners withdraw to discuss the situation. They decide that they have three alternatives. They can persuade him to leave and not tell anyone of their find in return for not killing him; they can take him in as a fourth partner; or, they can kill him. For a brief moment they look at each other and then without any further discussion one partner asks, "Who's going to do it?" It is a drastic move. None of them has ever killed a man before, but they have become desperate, selfish men. The matter is settled by concluding that they should all shoot him at the same time.

They return to the edge of a cliff where the stranger has been awaiting their decision. All that needs to be done is to shoot him and push him over the edge. "Well..?", he asks. The men pull their guns. The stranger shows little surprise, not an unexpected decision, another disastrous event in a string of bad luck. At the last minute, however, the stranger turns to look down the cliff and calmly remarks, "Before you pull the trigger, you better look down there." The men see a large cloud of dust far down the mountain and soon the cause is clear. Coming up the mountain on horse back, riding at a furious pace, is a large group of Mexican bandits. Fear instantly registers on the faces of the men. Without saying a word, a gun that a moment ago was to be used to kill the stranger is uncocked and tossed to him; the four men get ready to defend themselves. They were enemies, but now there is much larger outside threat.

The four men are able to ambush the bandits, and after a furious gun battle, force them to retreat by inflicting heavy casualties. On their side, only the stranger is killed. Before they bury him they find a letter from his wife. They discover that he was just like them. A man down on his luck, looking for some way to strike it rich so he could return to his wife and children.

Our situation as a species today is quite similar. In many ways we are surrounded by cosmological bandits and monstrous outside threats. From a cosmic perspective our differences, trumpeted daily on the front pages of our newspapers, vanish in the face of our cosmic setting and what should be our true self-interest. A cosmic perspective reveals an awesome cosmic predicament. We occupy a very small space and have lived a very small time. Our cosmic home is a place where monstrous violent physical processes are the norm. It would not take much for our little fragment of the universe to undergo drastic change and we, and all our accomplishments, would be gone.

A star close to us could become a supernova and fry the Earth with radiation. As our little star circles our galaxy, another star could pass close to our solar system, disturbing what astronomers call the Oort cloud, a swarm of trillions of comets which orbit our Sun beyond the orbit of Pluto. Some of these comets would be pushed into our solar system and meteor debris could then strike the Earth, causing death and mass animal extinctions -- a process that some scientists believe is a relatively normal periodic process, and the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Much closer to Earth, past the orbit of Neptune, is another swarm of perhaps up to a billion comets called the Kuiper Belt. Closer still is the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Finally, there are over 1,000 asteroids that are classified as "near-Earth" between a half mile and mile wide. Any hits from these asteroids would cause tremendous destruction on Earth. The asteroid or comet that caused the dinosaur extinction was believed to be a little over 6 miles in diameter. The asteroid 433 Eros is over two times larger (13.2 miles in diameter), and it is predicted by some astronomers to be gradually pulled by its gravitational interaction with Mars into an "Earth-crossing" orbit, possibly intercepting the Earth within a million years.¹⁹ A million years may not be much to worry about, but there are many asteroids and comets that we do not know about. The asteroid 4179 Toutatis was not discovered until 1989 and in November 1996 it zoomed across the night sky a mere 3 million miles from Earth. By 2004 Toutatis missed the Earth by only a little over 950 thousand miles. In January 2002 an asteroid large enough to destroy France or Texas hurtled past the Earth at a distance of only 500,000 miles, only twice the distance to the Earth's moon.  Called 2001 YB5, it was not discovered by astronomers until late December 2001.  At 1,000 feet across and traveling at 68,000 miles per hour, there would have been no time to protect the Earth. Given enough time, enough cosmic debris, and gravity, like strangers in the night our Earth and some of this debris will meet in the future. Some astronomers estimate that a comet strikes Jupiter about once every 400 years and the Earth every 13 million years.²⁰ That our Earth appears calm and secure from cataclysmic outside forces is a temporal illusion.

If these time frames seem too remote, consider that even on Earth we live within a relatively small fragile slice of biological heaven. Below us are massive amounts of molten rock -- 99.9 percent of our Earth is an inhospitable hell. More often than we would like this fiery hell comes to the surface in the form of volcanic destruction. Here too we may be living at a relatively quiet time. Some scientists believe that massive past volcanic eruptions produced major extinctual disruptions on Earth. Above us is a relatively thin blanket of protective ozone shielding us from deadly ultraviolet rays from the Sun and left over radiation from supernovas. If your body could be magically transported to Mars, you would die of an agonizing sunburn much before you would freeze to death; there is no ozone layer on Mars.

Within this protective belt on Earth all our infrastructure that seems so durable and impressive resides on relatively thin shells of moving plates that crash into each other causing earthquakes and massive tidal waves. Consider that one hundred thousand years from now Los Angeles will be next to San Francisco, because Los Angeles is on a plate sliding toward San Francisco. Both cities will be destroyed long before this happens. Some day half of the large volcano called Kilauea on the island of Hawaii will fall into the ocean, causing a tidal wave (tsunamis) about 1,000 feet high. The tidal wave will destroy the city of Honolulu within minutes and race across the pacific at 600 miles per hour and devastate cities in Japan, California, and Australia.²¹

Because we are living at a relatively mellow time cosmologically and geologically, the majority of the people on our planet ignore, forget, or are ignorant of our true cosmic setting. And like the men in the Bogart film, we fail to realize our common interest as all citizens of a very fragile, temporary little piece of paradise. We destroy parts of our ozone protection in pursuit of short-term business gain, and think that some things on Earth are so important that they are worth killing each other over.

Philosophers use the word contingent to refer to the fact that our existence is dependent upon events that we have no control over. The world view of modern science that we are examining shows us to be contingent beings with an historically contingent past. No plan for the special production of the human species is apparent. Many events had to be just right or we would not be here, and there is no special guarantee for the future of our species. Less technically, the world view of modern science shows us to be very, very lucky.

Some people are shocked by the apparent meaninglessness of this view of life. You mean the universe was doing billions of things before we got here and it did not wait until we could take center stage? You mean the universe is going about its business without special regard to our safety and happiness, and that in an instant it could crush us like an insect? However, one can also find exhilaration and resolve in this view. We have been able to figure it out, and we are not only very lucky, we are very, very precious. The right conditions that produced the human species will never be repeated again.

Our cosmological calendar in this chapter is very misleading in one sense. It implies that the 14 billion year history of the universe has had but one purpose: the linear, progressive evolution of the human species. Yet the list of events on our calendar is only one possible list that could be displayed showing a particular species at the end. The cosmic calendar is not a list of progressive success. For instance, modern humans did not evolve from less intelligent, more brutal Neandertals. Neandertals were just as intelligent, just as compassionate, and existed at the same time as early humans. They had their day in the sun so to speak. They are gone, but our species will need to survive another 200,000 years to match their longevity.

An understanding of natural selection and evolutionary biology, the science that fills in the details of natural selection on Earth, demonstrate that even on Earth we are not special. No species is special. The majority of life forms that have lived on this planet are extinct, and the average life time of a species is 10 million years and a vertebrate species like ourselves a mere 2-3 million years.

A study of biological evolution is a sobering and humbling experience, revealing no direction or purpose. Life evolves, not with a design in mind or lofty plans for the development of a ruling creature, but by offering variety, spinning the wheel of chance with every birth, gesturing with each unique creature for acceptance from the environment. In the process it produces a "messy" equality, a very wide bush of successful branches with no branch any more fit than another or guaranteed a long future. Human beings are doing well in terms of sheer survival numbers, but insects are also doing very well, and they have been here much longer and are much more likely to survive a human-made or natural catastrophe. As humans, we boast and celebrate that we alone possess "intelligence," but even if this is true, there is no guarantee from nature that this characteristic is any better than the body structure of a mosquito; it is just another experiment, another gesture for acceptance, perhaps only an evolutionary afterthought. All we can honestly say is that both the characteristics possessed by human beings and mosquitoes have served each well, so far.

We are all related. We are all cousins, floating together on this fragile blue biological refuge. No supremacy exists amongst biological brethren, only creatures adapted to their environments for the moment. What evolutionary biologists call the fossil record is sobering in this respect. The trilobite, an animal that flourished for over 150 million years in the ancient seas, some 400 million years ago, is now extinct; it demonstrates that although life has thrived on Earth for a very long time, adaptability is temporary and does not insure future success. The trilobite is an example of a radical invention that took place in these ancients seas, the shell. It also shows that complexity and sophistication are not the inevitable products of better, more modern times or "higher" creatures. The eyes of one species of trilobite consisted of 15,000 separate lenses. Its closest living relative is the less sophisticated horseshoe crab.

The fossil record also shows transitions between life and death. Archaeopteryx, or "ancient bird," shows transitional features between those of the dinosaurs and birds. A bird's feather is made of the same material as that of a reptile's scales (so are our finger nails!), but more striking is that in archaeopteryx we see examples of a reptile claw and tail. Most evolutionary biologists today have concluded that this creature was not a true bird. Because of its body structure, its wings would have been very weak, and it was probably just a glider.²³

Moles are another example of nature's evolutionary flexibility.  Many species have very reduced eyesight; some are blind. Instead they have sense organs at each end of their bodies, large hands, and powerful forelegs for a life spent predominantly underground, digging tunnels and harvesting worms that fall into the tunnels. Moles are also an example of another evolutionary revolution, the mammal. When the dinosaurs became extinct about 65 million years ago, the mammals developed in many directions. They now come in many shapes and sizes, possessing various survival strategies.

The variety of our brethren is endless. Variety is nature's way of making sure something works. Many species of anglerfish flourish in the seas, some at great depths. All possess little fishing poles, fleshy appendages that grow from the tops of their heads, with which to entice a dinner close to their mouths. The pink flower mantis looks exactly like a beautiful flower, which is very convenient when you eat insects that are attracted to such colorful displays.

The echidna is a mammal that looks like a ball of spikes. With powerful claws, this spiny anteater can dig into the hardest ground in seconds for protection. The tamandua is a tree anteater; it looks like a big dog with a very long nose. The long-eared bat uses sonar to experience the world. It sends out clicks 20-30 times a second and can navigate quickly around objects at night, a navigational feat that no human machine could dare mimic. The tarsier, which still lives in the forests of Southeast Asia, is an example of early mammal development. Like most early mammals it is nocturnal and has developed large eyes to gather light at night. It looks like a strange little bear with funny suction-like feet for grasping the tree branches in which it lives, and its eyes are so large that they are fixed in their sockets. To overcome this disadvantage, it can swivel its head 180 degrees and look directly backward without turning its body.

In spite of this ancestry, not all mammals are fierce and jittery. The sloth, which resembles a huge, elongated dog with long, spiked claws, reveals an evolutionary development that parallels the loss of flight in some birds. Because of a nonthreatening environment, this creature has not only lost its ancestral nervousness, but lives as if in a slow motion time warp. The less an animal moves, the less it has to eat -- just another survival strategy. The sloth has a top speed of half a mile an hour, sleeps 18 hours per day, and has a disgusting hygiene---algae, moths, and even caterpillars make its fur their home. It even defecates and urinates only once a week. As obnoxious as this creature may be to us, it displays the same revolutionary reproductive strategy common to all mammals: love and care for their young. The attraction to our babies is part of our mammalian heritage. This ability to relate positively to a youngish appearance may well account for the popularity of the five inch tall pygmy marmoset monkeys at zoos, puppies, and even, according to the late Harvard naturalist, Stephen Jay Gould, the progressively more childish appearance of the cartoon character Mickey Mouse over the years.

An awareness of the endless variety and temporary adaptability of life on Earth is crucial for our times. Much of human history has been dominated by a philosophical and religious outlook that has repeatedly granted a central status to human nature and questionably professed a special dominion for humankind over the Earth and its resources. Not understanding our true setting and our evolutionary past is as dangerous as ignoring the law of gravity.

Today, the vast number of ethnic conflicts around the globe, the debate over who is a terrorist and who is a freedom fighter, genetic engineering and the genome project, cloning and biological weapons are just some of the major concerns that have replaced the fear of nuclear armageddon. Investing some time in understanding our true cosmic setting is not only practical in the immediate sense of avoiding tragic mistakes founded on ignorance,²⁴ but supplies the philosophical setting for a more unified planet as well.

Our existence on this planet is the result of a meandering path of serendipity. We now have much power. The same knowledge that allows us to genetically engineer plants to produce a new polymer in their leaves and seeds for a biodegradable plastic, also allows us to potentially engineer viral weapons that would target specific ethnicities. What we do with this power will depend on our values. What values we ought to have will depend crucially on understanding the big picture and what Sagan called our cosmic perspective.  As he summarized in his 1994 Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light."