• Question: How did the world start? how am i here today?

    Asked by Jamie to Colin, John, Kevin, Shikha, Triona on 8 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by chalice242.
    • Photo: Kevin Motherway

      Kevin Motherway answered on 8 Nov 2014:


      Thankfully this isn’t Twitter based as 150 characters just wouldn’t cut it for questions like this. There’s two real answers to this.

      Many people believe that human beings were created by a divine Deity ( Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu depending on what culture you were born in and what you believe is the right belief system for you) and that we have a special purpose in that we must strive for perfection in terms of perfecting our soul to achieve salvation or access to an afterlife. There is no proof for this and it’s not a question that can be answered by science, it’s a matter of faith (belief based on spiritual conviction rather than proof)

      The other view is that in an infinite universe with infinite possibilities Earth is maybe just one of many planets in the Cosmos that can support not just simple life but higher-end conscious life that can ponder such questions. In a universe of infinite possibilities it may be inevitable for life to occur. You may be an inevitable accident that occurred in a universe that does not care if you exist or not.

      Either your life is a precious gift from a deity or you are some of the luckiest matter in the universe that has somehow assembled itself into a conscious being that for a brief period gets to laugh, love, enjoy friends, music, literature, food, wine and the many pleasures and sorrows that make up life. Either way, your life is a very precious thing, never to be casually wasted or thrown away. Use it wisely, try and make a difference. Be a scientist: solve a piece of the puzzle, cure a disease, fix climate change, invent something to make our fleeting lives better.

    • Photo: Colin Johnston

      Colin Johnston answered on 10 Nov 2014:


      The Solar System, including Earth, the other planets and the Sun, formed in a vast stellar nursery, probably the consequence of the shockwave from an exploding star slamming into an ancient giant molecular cloud.

      We see similar sites elsewhere in the Universe, for example dozens of forming solar systems (called protoplanetary discs) have been seen in the Orion Nebula which is the closest stellar nursery to us.

      Scientists believe that planets formed when lumps of rock and metal orbiting the Sun bumped together and stuck, forming ever bigger lumps. Again we see this kind of process happening elsewhere in the Universe.

      Single-celled life arose early in Earth’s history but you would be better asking a biologist about this. Larger and more complex organisms made out of lots of cells appeared much more recently about 700 million years ago. this is the line of evolution that lead to us.

    • Photo: Shikha Sharma

      Shikha Sharma answered on 13 Nov 2014:


      Hi jamie and chalice242,
      Approximately 14 billion years ago our universe emerged from a single point with a violent blast called Big Bang. It was just a matter of chance, modern physics can not explain why Big Bang happened from a single point of infinite density and zero volume called singularity. Immediately after Big Bang gravitation and all other physical laws started operating and guided evolution of Universe in such a way that it reaches to a state as it is today. Once again it is matter of one out of many possibilities. About 400 million years ago electron & protons came together to form hydrogen; hydrogen atoms came together to form gigantic clouds; inside the cloud hydrogen continued to turn into helium and emitted huge energy. This is how early starts were formed. This process continued and billion of billion of stars were formed. Out of billion of billion stars one was the Sun. Around the Sun gravity slowly gathered gas and dust together into clumps that became asteroids and small early planets. These objects collided repeatedly and gradually got bigger, building up the planets in the Solar System, including our the Earth. It happened approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The birth of Earth was just an one of infinite possibilities. Earth had eventually got environmental condition to form life and support evolution of life and therefore human race came into existence before 200,000 years ago. This is how the universe, stars, galaxies, solar system, earth, life and us are here today. Hence Science can very much explain how we are here. However, every milestone of development of universe is just a possibility out of infinite other possibilities. Any slight changes in physicals laws or time or origin of universe would lead to a very different kind of universe. But we are lucky that everything happened in such a way so that we came into existence. Why so? Science can’t answer…..as of now!!!!!

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