What had to take place in order for us to exist?

This is actually an amazing list of very precise events that had to occur for humans to be presently what they are, and the wild thing is that it’s not a complete list.

First, the Big Bang had to happen. This is a given. Without the Big Bang there was nothing, according to physicists. I disagree with that premise and I’m not alone. There are some physicists who believe that the Big Bang is only one of many Big Bang events. They propose that the laws of physics always existed and that energy exited outside of time. These are cosmologists that ascribe to the Bane theory, a flavor of string theory, which says that energy membranes always existed and that occasionally they wave around and make contact to cause a giant energy explosion, what we call a Big Bang. This is just a theory that hasn’t been proved, but it does have merit mathematically.

The next thing that had to occur after the Big Bang is for the right mix of quantum particles to condense out of the original energy soup after it cooled a bit. The crazy thing is that both matter and antimatter existed at this time. Antimatter is matter with the opposite charge. An antiproton has a negative charge instead of a positive charge. Anti electrons are called positrons and they have a positive instead of the negative charge that we’re familiar with. The problem with antimatter and matter existing at the same time is that they hate each other and when they come into contact they both are annihilated with the production of an enormous amount of energy, much more than produced by nuclear fusion. As it turns out there was one extra matter particle in a million that appeared after the Big Bang. This was just enough to make matter prevail over antimatter. This matter is what we see in the universe and it’s the kind of matter that we’re made out of.

As I’ve discussed before, the God particle Higgs Boson) had to condense out of the energy soup of the Big Bang. Without this particle, matter would not have mass and without mass there would be no gravity, one of the four energy forces that split after the Big Bang. Without gravity, there are no stars, no galaxies, and no us. The other forms of energy are the Weak nuclear force, the Strong nuclear force and electromagnetic energy. Gravity is by far the weakest energy force but it’s absolutely necessary for human existence.

This gravity was important for the formation of huge stars in the early universe. These immense stars, which resulted from the clumping of hydrogen gas into a dense ball, burned bright and died within a relatively short time, say a hundred thousand years, and when they went supernova, they formed black holes, which because of their strong gravity attracted each other to form super massive black holes. These behemoths of the universe were instrumental in forming galaxies where new stars could be created. Astronomers call these star nurseries. These new stars were smaller but much larger than our sun, and when they went supernova, they produced a lot of the elements that are necessary for life, such as carbon, oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen and other heavier elements such as iron, lead, silicon, silver, gold, uranium and others. The reason these heavier elements are important is that they made the formation of planets possible. Later, smaller stars like our sun appeared to form solar systems. One of these solar systems produced the planet Earth.

As we now know, planet formation is ubiquitous throughout our galaxy and the universe, and our solar system formed the planet that we know and love, planet Earth. Earth formed because of another interesting force called electrostatic force. This is what makes your shirt cling in odd ways when the humidity is low and it’s what gives you as shock when you touch a doorknob under the same conditions. Well, it turns out that this is what made dust in the primordial solar system clump together. With time, these clumps of dust collected more dust and formed rocks that began to attract each other because of gravity. Eventually, these rocky conglomerations formed planetoids and then by bombardment, formed planets, like Mercury, Venus, Mars, and good old Earth. The gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn formed out of ice and gas, and their formation was very important for the emergence of human life because after the heavy bombardment period when the early Earth collected lots of mass by being hit by asteroids and comets, the gas giants helped protect us from further damage by attracting these objects and putting them into a separate orbit around the sun that is known as the asteroid belt.

Scientists are not quite sure how life started on Earth, but one thing is for sure: life needed water, and the Earth got plenty of that from comets and asteroids. These cosmic objects brought life-giving water to Earth and made it possible for the next most important event, an atmosphere with oxygen. This is the result of the formation of cyanobacteria, a blue-green algae, and this plant-like life formed oxygen by a process known as photosynthesis, which converts carbon dioxide to oxygen by a complicated chemical process that required light from the sun. With the introduction of oxygen, animals developed using the oxygen as a means to burn the fuel from food to move around and evolve into more complicated life, first in the oceans and then on the land that emerged from volcanic activity.

Volcanoes are necessary for the evolution of life. They thrust magna through the Earth’s crust, which cooled to form the land that became continents. These continents moved around by tectonic forces and eventually arranged into the configuration that we see today and provided a stage for the evolution of higher life forms that eventually led over millions of years to us humans.

The next thing that had to happen for us to appear is the asteroid collision in the Yucatan sixty five million years ago that caused the dinosaurs to become extinct. This allowed little furry rat-like nocturnal mammal creatures to emerge from hiding and evolve over millions of years into hominid creatures that eventually became modern humans (homo sapiens) approximately two hundred thousand years ago.

There are many evolutionary steps that led up to this marvelous event that are too numerous to mention in this post, but the end result is that we humans are the most advanced species on Earth by a long series of fortunate events that I believe were not an accident of nature as some scientists say. They required the clever mind of a creator.

Thanks for reading.