Dixon pauses to reflect on the remarkable sequence of events that led us to where we are today.
The best estimate for the birth of the universe puts it on a Tuesday afternoon about 13.5 billion years ago (give or take). It would have been a monumental event to witness, if there had been anyone around to witness it or (more mind-bendingly) anywhere to witness it from. It would have been a bit like a government inquiry: an initial, incredible burst of energy and noise and light and then … nothing.
Nothing for quite a long time, in fact. The atoms created in the Big Bang drifted around in the vast void of space, occasionally straying close enough to other atoms for them to be attracted to each other. This went on for a bit, and lumps of stuff started to form. After a while – quite a long while – the matter aggregated further, forming stars. The universe as we now know it began to take shape.
Stars are important in this tale. Almost everything we see around us owes its fundamental existence to stars. Everything. Chickens. iPads. The spongy stuff they use in packing crates. Custard. All of the atoms in everything we can see came from the Big Bang, via a star, and the incredible processes that led to atoms being fused together to form the whole range of elements we know today. And then those elements were flung into space in explosions of unimaginable violence, slowly cooling and clumping together to form planets, including our own.
Our planet came into existence about 4.5 billion years ago (relatively recently, cosmically speaking). And human beings appeared a lot more recently than that, although the processes that led to us being here today started not all that long after the planet itself was formed.
At some point in our past, we discovered that just below the surface of the planet were all these elements – created earlier, in stars – just waiting to be dug up and used. Of course, we first had to think of things that they’d be good to use for. Then we had to develop techniques for finding and digging up this stuff, and we also had to develop techniques to process and refine it. Then we had to develop industrial and engineering processes to actually make the stuff do something useful. And we designed and created objects of often great utility and beauty.
Cars, for example. Modern cars are remarkably complicated pieces of engineering; they’re undoubtedly useful, and some are genuinely beautiful. If you think about what’s had to happen – the complexity and the sequence of events – for these things to be conjured into existence, it’s a wonder they exist at all.
First the universe had to create the raw materials from which they could be made. Then we had to wait while life evolved to a point at which it occurred to us to use those raw materials to start making things. Then we had to develop the technology to bring those materials together – in exactly the right form, in exactly the right quantities and at exactly the right time – to transform them into what we wanted.
If the universe had not started and evolved just so, if humans had not evolved in exactly the way we have (along with the imagination to create things), then we might not have cars today. We might have something better; we’d almost certainly have something different. There is expertise and industry and innovation and ingenuity in creating these things – I’m thinking specifically about the German car industry.
But imagination and hard work weren’t enough. We also needed political and economic structures that allowed industries to grow and flourish, and to enable free trade and the movement of goods. We had to create logistics chains so these goods could be physically transported from their place of manufacture to their ultimate consumers.
That’s exactly what BMW and Mercedes have done. It’s an amazing and incredible journey. The odds of it happening in exactly the way it has must be, well, astronomical.
I was reflecting on all of this just the other day while I was standing at a bus stop near my house and a Mercedes and a BMW smashed into each other at the roundabout.
Dixon Bainbridge can be contacted via Professional Planner HUB – www.professionalplanner.com.au/hub – unless the cosmos have conspired to cause this e-mail to crash again.
