About 13.8 billion years ago, everywhere at the same time, General Relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics started to work. Before all this there was something: fleeting, hot and dense things that are beyond our comprehension, but after that there was even more. All of this, of course, started with a big bang. Gravity came first, attracting and affecting everything. Just after the other interactions were dropped: the strong and the electroweak .
This was the time of inflation. No currency was devalued. There were no currencies, no economic system, no concept and no need for money, but the universe inflated and expanded like it never had before and never would again. As it expanded, it cooled enough to separate the electroweak interaction into “electro” and “weak” and to allow the arrival of quarks, gluons, and leptons , but nothing more.
Until a millionth of a second later, when the hadrons arrived, made up of combinations of quarks, mainly protons and neutrons. This was also the moment when matter won the first of several lopsided battles against antimatter, preventing the universe from turning into photon soup. Luckily it was not like that and the party continued. The neutrinos had had enough of everything after the first second of existence and retreated to the back of the room. Although the quarks had already relaxed into small groups, the leptons were still in a constant state of oscillation. After about 3 seconds they also got tired, giving way to the photon epoch.
In the first minutes of the universe , nuclei of deuterium, helium, and even tiny amounts of lithium began to form . After tens of thousands of years, the first large structures appeared that would give rise to galaxies and clusters of galaxies and after the first hundred thousand years, the first molecule and shortly after, darkness fell. The universe, which had been opaque until then, became transparent . Electrons and atomic nuclei were finally able to combine and recombine and the photon era ended, ushering in a dark age.
Several hundred million years later the first stars formed . With them came new chemical elements and galaxies, nebulae, supernovae, and later the first planets. After a billion years or so, the Milky Way began to form, and later the Sun, the rest of the planets and the Earth, which 4.5 billion years ago was nothing more than a ball of incandescent magma. Over time it cooled, the water vapor precipitated and formed oceans. There, among stardust, hot springs and sunlight, chemistry did its thing and began to join atoms and molecules until… surprise! A molecule appeared capable of copying itself and making mistakes in the process that over time made it even more capable of copying itself! This is how we believe life began .
Over time, this life developed layers, fluids, and molecules specialized in, for example, processing CO 2 releasing useless O 2 molecules, thereby inventing photosynthesis. Other noteworthy useful inventions throughout the history of the evolution of life on Earth have been DNA, mychondria, the cell nucleus, sex, multicellularity, muscle and nerve tissue, the cell wall, the endothermy or flowers.
Over billions of years all life developed in the oceans and for about 500 million years also on land. After several mass extinctions and after living in the shadows for about 100 million years, it was the turn of the mammals. About 6 million years ago, one of those mammals, an ape, began to separate into several species, one of which would eventually create pointed rocks, dominate fire and use it for cooking, and would even begin to wear clothing.
While this was happening his skull was growing and his brain becoming more and more complex. Over time, the first drawings, jewelry, funerary rituals and barter also arrived, but everything changed when this curious ape invented agriculture about 10,000 years ago. With it came tons of super cool innovations, like countless diseases, trade, governments, taxes, wars, and even pandemics. With agriculture also came animal domestication, adult tolerance to lactose or the development of industry and the knowledge that would bring us inventions that would help us build better, see better, orient ourselves better, collect and transmit information better, to exploit better or to build machines that do all that better than any human ever could.
And in the midst of so much progress and progress, you were born, cosmic improbability where they exist, and you lived a life with better and worse moments, which led you, without knowing exactly how, to read these lines. Anyway.
