The Journey To Here

 

Recently, as I was staring in open-mouthed awe at the latest batch of photos from NASA, I found myself ruminating on the dense star clusters and nebulae and thinking about the vast stretches of time that they represented. The earliest stars were accretions of gas, nearly 100% hydrogen if I understand the process. (No guarantees here) It is only after a sufficient mass is achieved that fusion kicks off in the star's core. It's only then that other elements begin to form. Before then, there were no metals, no rocks, only the simplest of elements. The periodic table was really simple in the opening days of the universe, there was only one, at most possibly three elements; hydrogen, a little helium and maybe a tiny bit of lithium. The rest of the elements were yet to be created by fusion in the hearts of those early suns.

Now consider our Solar System, and whatever other star systems that we've been able to acquire any information about, which began life as accumulations of rock and dust. Which leads us to the conclusion that the earliest stars had to live out their lives, explode as novae, and spew their newly formed elements across the universe before stars like our Sun and its surrounding planets even had the most basic building materials for accretion! We think of or little chunk of the universe as being unimaginably ancient, but there had to be at least a generation of stars, more likely several generations that had to exist and die before our current universe as we know it could even begin!

I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I have existed for nearly 71 trips around our star, trying to gain a grasp on the chasms of time that had to pass before our unremarkable little sun got me to this place in time leaves me stunned!

Its times like this that I almost wish that I could convince myself that a deity was possible. It would be so much easier if I could just not think about it and claim that "Goddidit!"

It makes one understand the sheer seductiveness of religion.