A Beautiful Concept

I want to share a thought I like to come back to occasionally and see what it kicks loose.

Ultimately, we are made of stardust. If you trace the history of the universe backwards to its inception at the big bang and then watch it unfold in fast forward, you'll witness the most dramatic story ever told.

The singularity, the universe before it was anything, was a near infinitely small but infinitely dense point, smaller than an atom, containing all the matter that would ultimately make up the mind-bogglingly vast cosmos we see today. How long did it exist in that state? Impossible to know. Time and space were wrapped up together inside that tiny point. But at some pivotal moment (language really doesn't have a good way to deal with time out of time) the singularity exploded.

The bang went out in all directions, filling the void with a perfectly homogeneous blanket of energy. Or nearly perfect. Slight inconsistencies in the early universe caused energy to coalesce more in certain areas than others, and as the universe cooled and matter was born from this energy, these pockets of matter/energy grew, becoming galaxies and stars and planets, and eventually...us.

Now view the evolution and growth of the cosmos as a life cycle. Infancy and childhood, followed by tumultuous changes, growing ever more complex and subdivided. Simple life on various planets comes into existence as young adulthood flowers, clearing the path for exponential spikes in diversity and complexity as the cosmos reaches adulthood. Then; a quantum leap forward. We (or other intelligent life elsewhere in the universe) emerge with a singular consciousness. A mind capable of self-awareness, capable of knowing that it, as an entity, exists. Capable of questioning itself and the universe. A mind constantly searching for answers.

Here's my favorite part. If we are made from stardust, born billions of years ago in distant, long-dead suns, our matter and minds forged by the long process of cosmic expansion, then our search for answers is actually the universe finally capable of and attempting to understand itself. We are all equal and natural extensions of the universe's long evolution. It was only a matter of time before something as vast and inexplicable as the cosmos developed a capability for self-examination.

"What a beautiful thought I just thought," thinks the universe.