GOD, LIFE AND TIME
The physics of the Universe being able to support such a system as evolution is unbelievably complex and remarkable.
TEMPERATURE
The unlikeliness of finding a planet that has water (which seems to be a necessary part of life) is extraordinarily small.
Most of the universe is cold, approaching -273°C or thereabouts. Water is ice at that temperature. The heat sources
of the universe are very hot. Stars, like our sun, have a temperature of about 5500°C at the surface.
-273°C
Temperature of
much of the
universe
0-100°C
Water
5500°C
Temperature of
surface of the sun
SOLID STUFF
The volume of the universe is between 1083 and 10113 cubic meters. (It is quite incredible that the volume estimate
has such a wide range. Basically we don’t know how big it is. It could be a billion, billion, billion, billion, billion times
bigger than we estimate at the lower range. We will only ever be able to see less than 1,000th of the universe. Within
the universe there is solid stuff, like planets and stars. That corresponds to about 10 52 cubic meters. If the universe
were the size of our world, the solid stuff would be the size of a grain of sand, everything else would be space. Space
is massive. Within that solid stuff there is the unknown dark matter which must exist according to the most recent
models, but it is most unclear what that is. In addition there are suns, planets, gas and other material like comets,
asteroids and moons. Most have no possibility of any life because they are too hot, too cold, to big (and therefore the
gravity is too great), too small (stuff just floats away), too unsafe (being pelted with rocks or cosmic rays or something
else), too massive (like a black hole which is very small but heavy and the gravity is so large that even light can’t get
out), too near another planet (so it gets squeezed and crushed every time it goes round the planet), etc.
Something like five planets and one new star are born into the universe every second.
If all the solid stuff in the universe were our world, our earth would be a grain of sand.
Candidate planets for life require near impossible conditions to exist, yet with such a large universe and a long enough
time, those conditions will occur from time to time. Here, the near impossible has happened and we have life in all its
abundance. It truly is a pearl of great price. It is like wining the highest prize in the National Lottery 10 times in a row.
If you have 13 billion years of National Lottery, then it will happen a few times.
For life to exist it seems there has to be elements other than Hydrogen and Helium. They are mainly what is created
when the stars burn. There has to be more. Zinc (tablets!), Copper….
H He Li Be B C N O F Ne Na Mg Al Si P S Cl Ar K Ca Sc Ti V Cr Mn Fe Co Ni Cu Zn…..
Lighter elements-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Heavier elements
Suns convert, in fusion, a lighter element to a heavier one. When that happens, until you get to Iron the reaction gives
off energy, so it works well. After Iron it takes energy to make the atoms, for example of Copper and Zinc. All of those
will only come from a supernova explosion where the energy from the collapse of a star into itself compresses atoms
into each other and creates copper and zinc.
Consequently, in reality, we are constructed of star dust. The elements after iron were not in any abundance until
supernova explosions.
The Big bang happened 13.8 billion years ago. The universe was infinitely small and expanded from a viciously hot
plasma, and at one point expanded faster than light. The energy cooled to mass, using the famous formula E=mc2. The
conversion rate was very poor. A one bar electric fire for an hour uses 1kw of electricity. c is the speed of light
(300,000 km/second) so the mass that would have been created from the equivalent of a one bar electric fire for an
hour would have been a thousandth of the mass of an eyebrow hair. To create such mass as in the universe the
energy would have had to be unimaginably large. With sufficiently sensitive instruments it is still possible to see the
light from that explosion. Time has been necessary for elements to exist, temperatures to drop, mass to be created,
cells to form… Wait, I say, on the Lord.