Universe Around Us

One of the things I find most fascinating to think about is our purpose here in the Universe. My next few blog entries will be precisely about that subject. I cannot say that I will be able to cover the breadth and width of such thoughts, but I wanted to at least begin the investigation of the subject. My thoughts, which I will expose here, are to as much illuminate my own thinking for myself as for anyone else. Though at very least I would hope my children would some day read these words and learn something of me and of the Universe.

First and foremost, I cannot begin thinking about such subjects without laying down the framework. The framework of this thinking is that I cannot take from what is not there. Meaning, I must view reality in its starkest forms to understand it. Overlaying my own human weaknesses, needs, fears and wants will only cloud such investigations. I may at times stray from such starkness, but I will warn you so you know when I'm exposing my own humanness away from the piercing glare of reality.

The reality of the Universe is that its infinitely, compared to us humans anyway, wide, long and deep. We are but a mote speck on a grain of sand in a huge ocean. Strangely enough, this does not make me feel small at all, but my feelings are what is under investigation. The Universe is also ancient in a way that we cannot truly fathom. Billions of years can be summarized by a few neat little zeros trailing behind a concrete number, but they cannot express all that is contained. The Universe is also - moving. Moving in a direction that gives it both a beginning and an imagined end (though an end we cannot begin to understand). This moving is not necessarily a direction, but a progression. This progression is a central theme in my understanding of the Universe and our place in it.

Once, there was the Singularity. We don't understand how it came to be or what came before it. The nature of the Singularity wipes out any hint of information that preceded it, so for our understanding, the Singularity is the beginning of the Universe as we know it. From the Singularity the progression of the Universe begin. The Universe begin to cool and complexities started to happen. Remember at first, it was a homogeneous event and thing with nothing really to differentiate between one place and another, but as the Universe cooled, it began to create things within it like new atoms and gases.

As billions of years passed the Universe has gotten more complex. Galaxies formed in which solar systems, planets, nebulae, black holes, neutron stars, all of which form a higher order of the Universe expanded. What once was a Singular thing had become, in our human understanding, infinitely complex. This complexity isn't always pretty, nor is the progress. Sometimes whole systems are swallowed by black holes, or planets wiped out because they were too near a supernova. While it may seem complex and chaotic, the Universe is actually creating order out of what was once a homogeneous Singularity.

On our own planetary scale, we've seen the same progression. What was once a ball of rock and lava cooling in the cosmic winds of our solar system, has become a tangled messy green life filled planet we all call home. This increasing complexity is a design of the Universe and is something that will happen with or without us and for most of its history, has happened without us. This does not diminish our own place in the Universe, something that is hard for some people to accept, but I'll leave that for my next blog. This beginning was only to set the stage for this discussion.

Signed,

The Purpose of the Universe (Part I)