It is suggested that energy can not be created or destroyed. There are unexplainable anomalies called singularities. Not even the most educated physicists can define or understand the randomness of these events. This idea of a singularity is the main evidence supporting the Big Bang Theory. This topic makes me nervous, and the direction I’m heading is scary, but these are just thoughts and not an attempt to disprove God’s existence. Besides there are absolutely no facts to support that. I search for enlightenment in writing these pages. Simply to extract these thoughts from my mind in hopes to better understand and piece together this puzzle of life.
I only agree to use the word theory because of the existence of certain facts I find to be compelling and undeniable. In scientific terms, the use of the word theory is a very serious implication. It is defined by “a rigorously tested hypothesis that every time results in positive data and is one step from absolute certainty.” It is the equivalent of Newton’s Law of Gravity, it is fact the apple always falls to the ground.
A singularity though, what does this mean? It is the unexplained and unexplainable creation and destruction of energy, of matter, of possible life. It happens continuously and most always without repercussion. A singularity exists within a simple atom, which is a microscopic particle of unexplainable existence on an infinite list of unanswered questions. A singularity usually appears and disappears like a flash of lightening, so fast you’ll miss it if you blink. For some reason though, this one time out of millions of times, my singularity 14 billion years ago became unstable. BOOM, the creation of matter, of energy, of life, and now I am here, I exist.
Billions of years spent tumbling in the unknown, fumbling about banging around like a pinball in a galactic nebula arcade game. Like particles finding and attracting to like particles in some high school clique fashion, separated by temperature and gravity instead of class or race. Like new lovers accreting and suturing bit by bit only to decide on some shaky existence twisting and turning about a burning star pretending to have some control over our orbit, our place in life, or our destiny.
The evidence of an explosion is clear still today. It is recorded in the stars as well as in life itself. Humans can recreate this explosion and we have many times. Humans use it for destruction instead of creation. We call it the hydrogen bomb, an unstable singularity. Like the evil that floats around mankind waiting for the perfect moment to attack society. Certain radiation that only exists after this particular type of explosion is found wandering about the solar system. I know what it can do to planets’ ecosystems and fauna. I have viewed the effects of Hiroshima. I’ve seen the pictures of the mutated babies and the devastated land. Without Earth’s special magnetic fields and Ozone layer it would be bombarded with this radiation from the Sun and life as we know it could not exist. That’s lucky I guess?
I often fluctuate between these perfect circles of sense and chaotic patterns of ovals mimicking the Earth’s eccentricity around the Sun. Cycling between these ovals of almost losing grip to being pulled back to a perfect circle just in time by some centripetal force of morality guiding me ever around.
Evolution
It appears to me that every where I look I see things constantly changing. I can only describe evolution as amazing, incoherent, provable, and Godly magical. I have witnessed it with my own eyes, the change. Once living organisms turned to stone, pure stone and you can see the difference in life from then and now. I see images of it in the seasons. Spring comes, flowers bloom, and how about the butterfly leaving its cocoon. It’s all evolution.
I do this mental experiment it doesn’t take long. I don’t even need to leave my own mind or my chair to reach a conclusion. I just ponder this hypothesis briefly and decide evolution could make sense to me:
A tadpole at birth is a prisoner to water. The eggs of an amphibian if not laid in water will desiccate. In its short life, it undergoes major changes through time, escapes the watery prison, and actually needs to breathe air with lungs.
To think at some point in time, life on this planet existed only as a single cell, less complex than bacteria. Time raced by and these simple lonely things assembled together, maybe by accident, who knows. I sometimes wonder if they, like us, were exploring the seas in hopes to find new and better resources. Symbiosis is organisms joining or residing in some near vicinity for mutual benefit. This is the latest hypothesis or idea describing the origin of complex multicellular organisms and what somehow later evolves to life. Is this possible? They have found the transitional fossils, the proof. I haven’t held them, but I have seen pictures from books, they seem trustworthy.
We find these carbonized fossil leaves from the Cooksonia plant, which is the first land plant ever. We find them as a thin black film of carbon on sedimentary rocks like smooth gray shale; it resembles the pencil rubbings of leaves you made in grade school. The first simple land plant is about 400 million years old. The leaves were long, thick, and waxy, which made them durable, but they were very simple. Leaves have now evolved into something delicate, intricate, and very complex. Flowering plants for example, technically known as angiosperms—their flowers are just special leaves. Fragile and manipulative, the rose has evolved to use bees, butterflies, and even humans to spread its seed or pollen. The rose’s distant cousin in a biological sense is Cooksonia. The transition clearly shows evolution at work.
These evolutionary impacts are called mutations. The sound of that word is scary and it makes me think of the X-men, but nothing has ever developed laser beam eyes, at least not yet. Genetic mutations occurring in the cells of an organism’s DNA. It changes some molecular code and alters the organism in some physical, chemical, or reproductive way. Some mutations are positive and some have a negative effect, but most are completely neutral.
I just learned all chordates, or organisms with a spinal cord, share the same embryo plan. Honestly, a turkey, a monkey, and even humans look alike as embryos. We all have gill slits at some point in our lives. Mutations in DNA, could this really be the deciding difference between me and a turkey?
Extinction
I think about these things and consider my short existence from birth to now and that leads me to more questions. When will my life end? Will humans go extinct? Is extinction a real possibility? It appears undeniable. Again, we see the proof everywhere. We find ancient creatures that are frozen in time, cast in stone and left like clues. Some of these creatures seem to have been forced to extinction, consumed to the point of no more and some by some celestial forces. I think as humans we may want to pay attention to history. The way we use up resources and consume everything to its end may cause our extinction. It’s happened before, you know, one organism over-consuming another, eventually leading to its own demise.
This seems as though it may be a good place to stop my quandaries about life. Maybe it’s just to be enjoyed and time not wasted with such questions. After all, our life is a blink of an eye. All of these ideas are very large and hard to comprehend, it’s all most impossible to make sense out of something you can see but can’t explain completely.
This sums up God and human existence for me, I guess. Incognito, a disguise I can almost see through, but the purpose and the creator will always be a mystery. The Big Bang a singularity, is this Genesis, the beginning?
To me it is obvious that life is manufactured by some higher existence. I see fragments of this all-knowing being, or at least what I feel are specs of the proof. I see it in the science, the singularities, evolution, and even in extinction. It opens the door to life, creation, destruction, progression, and the change through time.
I began writing this in hopes to gain some insight as to my life, my purpose. Maybe to understand my creator, or to become enlightened as to my situation on this planet. Some find science to be evil, disproving of God and their religion. But for me this is the very reciprocal. Science is my religion, my guide, and my scripture to understanding this evolving singularity called life.