Origins in 24 Hours


In the preface to Origins I’ve mapped out a ‘timeline of creation’, from the big bang to the origin of human consciousness, projected to a single day. On this reckoning, the universe ‘begins’ at midnight. Particles with mass appear the merest whisper of a fraction of a second afterwards, and the universe is bathed in light at the moment of recombination two seconds later, as primordial electrons latch themselves to primordial hydrogen and helium nuclei. Stars and galaxies first appear between 12:30 and 1:00 a.m., with complex molecules starting to make their appearance sometime between 3 a.m. and 6:30 a.m., in time for breakfast.

We’re then obliged to sit on our hands for most of the day – 9-10 hours – as we wait for the Sun and Earth to appear, at nearly 4 p.m. At some time during this wait, the expansion of the universe flips. The matter in the universe that has thus far been slowing down the rate of expansion becomes so dilute that ‘dark energy’ – the energy of ‘empty’ space – takes over and starts to accelerate the expansion once again.

Life emerges around 6 p.m., and complex cells and multicellular organisms around 8:30 p.m. A few hours later we see the beginnings of the diversification of animal species in the ‘Cambrian explosion’. Modern humans make their first appearance at about 1 second before midnight. Human consciousness develops throughout this second, but has begun to realize its full potential with the transition to behavioural modernity in the ‘Great Leap Forward’ which happens with just 300 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) left on the clock.

As Origins will, I hope, make abundantly clear, these have been a very busy few hundred milliseconds.

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