I remember when I was a young boy, maybe somewhere around the age of 13, I was in a tree in the backyard. (As hard as it may seem for some of today’s youth to imagine, kids actually did climb trees many years ago. We even road bicycles!) I used to meditate about deep things while sitting on a limb in a large oak tree in my mother’s backyard. One day, I found myself thinking, “Why am I even here? Why do I even exist at all? What is the meaning of life? Where did all of this come from?” Then, after meditating on these deeps matters, usually without coming to any concrete answers to these questions, my mind would wander to more current and pressing matters: “I wonder if that pretty blond haired girl (name omitted intentionally) who is in my Biology class is going to be hanging out at the library again today? I should probably ride my bicycle to the library again today and see if there are any books available that might provide answers to these pressing questions.”
As the years have gone by, I have come to the conclusion that these questions are not unique to me. Many minds greater than mine have pondered these questions. (I am referring to the meaning of life questions, not my wonderings about “name omitted intentionally”.) The reason I am writing this book is to answer those questions for others. I learned everything there is to know by the time I was 16, and I am glad I get to share this with others. This is my gift to humanity.
Table of Contents
1. The Beginning of Everything
2. The Universe
3. Life in Space
4. The Origins of Life
5. The Beginning of Mankind
6. The Origin of Concepts of Morality
7. Government
8. How We Arrived at Where We are Now
9. Conclusion
The Beginning of Everything
In the beginning, nothing existed. Science proclaims that within this nothingness, an ancient unknown power force, and a tiny, primordial atom, both of which were something, existed. We know this as a certainty because of the proclamation of science, and we know the certainty of scientific proclamation because it is the proclamation of science. The existence of something within nothing serves as the basis of the scientific inquiry. It is unreasonable to assume otherwise. To assume otherwise is to drown in the abyss of the violation of the separation of church and state, which is unconstitutional, as narrow-minded religious bigots are so fond of doing.
Approximately 10 to 20 billion years ago, this single, primordial atom appeared. Then, in one trillion trillionth of a second, this single primordial atom exploded. This tiny atom contained within its core all of the elements needed for the development of the universe, including the elements of space and time. This tiny, primordial atom exploded with astronomical speed, and all the elements contained within this atom expanded, and continue to expand to this present time, to create the Universe. As time passed, and matter cooled, more diverse kinds of atoms began to form, and they eventually formed into stars and galaxies. As it is the nature of tiny things that explode to evolve into complex systems, this is the only logical explanation we have for the origin of our universe. All other theories and beliefs are denied through the reasonableness of the scientific inquiry. Everything wasn’t, then it was, and so it began.
Technically, it is incorrect to refer to this as the “Beginning”, since beginning implies a starting point on the trajectory of linear time, and at this point, linear time did not exist until it had been released from the primordial atom. It is also incorrect to say, “at this point” as in my previous statement, because at this time (which at that time did not exist,) space did not exist either, and “point” implies a place, which could not have existed, since there was no such thing as space until this primordial atom which existed outside the realm of space and time, exploded, and time and space began. So, “the beginning” did not actually begin until after it had begun. To say, “Before the beginning there was nothing, except for the something that existed within the nothingness”, would be more accurate. There was nothing, then there was something.
The primordial atom was not created, it existed within nature, which did not exist until it was released. It simply was. It appeared, and it had all that was needed. The explosion of the atom was the result of the ancient, unknown power force. This ancient, unknown, and unexplainable power force existed before anything existed.
This truth was first discovered by a Belgian priest named Georges Lemaître in the 1920s. Until this time, Lemaitre had been indoctrinated into the oppressive and controlling theology of the Church, which taught the idea that a “god” existed outside of the realms of space and time and acted as the “Creator” of the universe as we know it. To the mind trained in science, the primordial atom fact makes much more sense than the belief in a transcendent being, who was in charge of the whole process. Although the origin of the primordial atom, and the ancient unknown power force that caused its explosion have not yet been determined, we must, in faith, accept the fact that, as science develops, unshackled by the constraints of religion and superstition, the answer to these questions will be discovered. For now, we just accept, through our faith in science, the fact that it did happen. To say that something that existed outside of the realm of existence, was created negates the validity of nature, which is the cause of all things.
Oddly enough, before Lamaitre made this discovery in 1920, the idea of a creator god had been prevalent in the minds of many people, and that was their answer to the question of our origin. There were many different versions of this creator myth that existed and were passed down from generation to generation in different societies and regions throughout the world. Thankfully, somewhere around the early 1700s, the Age of Enlightenment began, and many of these long held superstitious beliefs were abandoned in favor of reason, logic, and science. The scientific mind, trained in reason and logic cannot accept the idea that a “Creator” that we cannot see, feel or prove somehow mysteriously caused everything that exists to simply come into being. It just doesn’t make sense. We cannot explain the origin of the primordial atom, or the power force that acted upon it to make it explode, or the reason for its existence. Although we were not there to witness any of this, nor can we prove this in the sense that this phenomenon can be recreated in any sort of laboratory setting, we must hold rigidly to the specifics of science and view these ancient religious and unprovable myths with the utmost disdain. We hold this view for the advancement of mankind so that we may continue our race’s journey to perfection and ultimate fulfillment. Unprovable speculative theory is mankind’s path to freedom.
The Universe
The Universe is all of space and time and its contents. The Universe is everything. It is all that is. The Universe is hard to understand, because the majority of the Universe appears to exist in an unknown form called Dark Matter. Dark Matter is an unidentified type of matter. It is distinct from Dark Energy and Ordinary (Baryonic) matter. Dark matter does not interact with other forces such as radiation or light, and cannot be observed. Dark matter is a hypothetical kind of matter that is invisible to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Dark matter accounts for most of the matter in the Universe. Although there is a lack of conclusive identification of Dark Matter, it is scientifically accepted as a fact by most of the astronomical community. The Universe is indeed a mysterious place, although it is all places, since it is everything. It would only be logical to say that everything is shrouded in mystery, since the Universe is everything, and this mysterious “Everything” consists mostly of this hypothetical, invisible, and undefinable dark matter that does not react or respond to anything. The inability to observe or test Dark Matter serves as the basis for its scientific investigation. It is indeed a mystery, but science is unraveling this mystery!
The Universe contains planets, moons, minor planets, stars, galaxies and the contents of intergalactic space and all matter and energy. The universe is natural. The size of the Universe is unknown. We know that the universe is expanding, although we cannot measure it. This has been proven by the expanding universe theory. The Universe also contains other anomalies such as black holes, and nebulas. Black Holes are the opposite of White Holes and may consist of anti-matter, which is matter that is not.
Life in space
As the elements of the expanding Universe cooled, and stars and planets began to form, eventually life on these planets also began to form. At the current time, we do not have solid proof of how life on other planets exists, or in what forms it appears, but it is only logical to conclude, given the size and complexity of the Universe, that other forms of life, other than what we know of on this planet on which we live, do exist. It is unknown whether these other life forms will be like the life forms on this earth, and whether they will be hostile towards us. They will, or will not be, and this fact is certain. The conditions and time required for life to have begun on this planet are very precise and complex. The statistical probabilities of all these complex factors occurring at just the right time and in just the right order are very low, so it is only logical to conclude that if these improbabilities occurred on this planet, given the vastness of time and the size of the universe, this same improbable scenario has repeated thousands or even millions of times.
Human beings cannot live outside of the atmosphere of this planet without the aid of an artificial environment. Thus far in our technological evolution, we have only been able to travel to this Earth’s moon, although we have sent many unmanned vehicles to explore places that we currently do not have the ability to travel to.
The moon is approximately 238,900 miles away from the earth. (This is a range, based on the orbit.) Our next big flight will be to Mars, which, depending on the location of the planets in their orbits, can range from 35.8 million to 54.8 million miles away. This is an approximate range from December 2007 to October 2020, (projected). So, as our technology progresses, by the year 2030, we will be able to travel to Mars. Even though, currently we do not have the technology for a manned space flight that will be more than 230 times the distance to the moon, we will do it. When we finally develop to the point that we can travel effortlessly from galaxy to galaxy throughout the universe, we will encounter planets with atmospheres very much like Earth’s that we will be able to walk around on, unaided by space suits with breathing apparatus’. The inhabitants of these planets will look obviously have many of the same physical characteristics of humans, unless it is proven that they do not. The inevitability of this has been proven by the production of many science fiction movies.
The origins of life
As the elements of the exploding atom cooled and formed planets, at first there was no animated “life”, only planet stuff. Our own earth cooled, and began to form oceans, and mountains, and flatlands, and riverbeds, and so on and so forth. It took billions of years for the flow of water and the movement of the tectonic plates to form mountains, valleys, rivers, and all of the other aesthetically pleasing richness that nature has so bountifully provided accidentally for our enjoyment. For life to begin, a pair of simple compounds, which were plentiful on early earth, had to give rise to a network of simple reactions that produced the three major classes of biomolecules –nucleic acids, amino acids, and lipids- needed for the earliest forms of life to get started. It was all very simple. Simple compounds, simple reactions. When all the right circumstances happened, the genetic molecule, such as RNA or DNA, capable of passing along blueprints for making protein, formed. It happened! That is the inexplicable beauty of evolution. Simple advances to complex through the wonder of nature.
The origin of life is a natural process by which life arises from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. Through the process of evolution, non-living things give rise to life. An external source of energy, such as lightening, or radiation produced the chemical reaction that caused these simple compounds to form into the needed molecules. Life was started by single celled organisms, produced by this chain reaction, and progressed through the process of evolution to produce more and more complex forms of life. This same chance process has more than likely occurred on many other planets throughout the Universe. So, in the early days of Earth, there was no life, only stuff. The right stuff merged together at just the right time, in the right sequence, and in the right amounts. Then it either got struck by lightning, or it was exposed to radiation, (the source of which is yet to be determined,) and it came to life. That is how life began on Earth. The same process happened, or is going to happen on many other planets throughout the Universe.
Evolution
Once the first living organism was born, it began to mutate. The organism had to survive, so it mutated to better itself, and reproduce. Mutations are predominantly random and can occur naturally through errors in the reproduction process or through environmental impacts such as chemicals or radiation. This is what is known as Evolution. Evolution occurs when mistakes in reproduction occur, and the mistakes serve to better the species. This disproves the concept of “design”.
Until Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, humans did not give much thought to where they came from. People generally just accepted the religiously generated myths of their ancestors without questioning them. The antiquated myth of a “Creator-God” was just taken for granted until Darwin discovered, through the scientific method, that life evolved.
All life on Earth shares a common ancestor known as the Last Universal Common Ancestor, which lived approximately 3.5 to 3.8 billion year ago. It took a long time for all the changes to take place that needed to take place for the Universal Common Ancestor to eventually evolve into man.
The original single cell organism evolved from the aforementioned process. It then began to multiply and mutate. The mutations went in many different directions. Some of the organisms mutated into plant life. Some of the organisms mutated into animal life. All the beautifully complex life forms that currently exist on this planet are the result of these random genetic mistakes and mutations occurring over billions of years. Thus, what originally would have appeared to be a very chaotic and random process, eventually began to evolve into order and beauty. Life became more and more complex. We see this in any natural setting. Chaos will eventually become ordered and complex, given sufficient time, without being acted upon by any external power force. Random chaos produces order and beauty if given sufficient time. Fortunately, time, which originally did not exist, began to exist, and made this process possible, because without vast resources of time, it could not have happened, unless it did.
Through the process of Natural Selection, (which is not a power force, but is nature,) as the organisms reproduced, the characteristics that did not serve the advancement of the species died out, or failed to continue to reproduce, except when they reproduced. Simple life forms became more complex, but some not as complex as others. From this process comes the rich diversity of life that we witness on this planet. Today, because of the process of Natural Selection and mistakes in reproduction, modern human beings are born without birth defects.
The Beginning of Mankind
All of the modern variations of mankind that exist on the Earth today evolved from a common ape-like ancestor. This is a scientifically proven fact because it has been proclaimed. This common ape-like ancestor lived and roamed Earth only a few million years ago. We know that this is a fact because of the skeletal similarities in human beings and apes. Qualified anthropologists have reconstructed the vast, but extremely limited resources of primate bone fragments, and through the process of artistic liberty, have been able to accurately depict for the general public what the lifestyles of these ancient ape-men were like. Modern apes evolved on a different trajectory. Through the process of Natural Selection, in which we understand that organisms mutate and survive to their betterment, the betterment of some is to become apes, and the betterment of others is to become human. The “ideal” primate is neither ape or human, it is both. Apes evolve to become perfect apes, and humans evolve to become perfect humans.
This is the beauty, (implying an aesthetic value), of Natural Selection. It takes many different paths. So initially, single cell organisms can evolve into water dwelling creatures, creatures that fly, or bipedal creatures (to name only a few,) as the environmental need arises. There is no inherent “design” contained within the organisms. The patterns through which they evolve are contained within the DNA. The DNA contains the designer-less blueprints through which evolution occurs, and this lack of design is passed onto successive generations and reproduced according to this process until a new, species enhancing mutation occurs, or the species evolves into another animal entirely. For example, over the course of time, the brontosaurus evolved into the modern wren, as the environmental need arose.
The facts of mankind’s evolution have been and continue to be modified and rewritten as new discoveries emerge, as earlier facts are proven incorrect and discarded. Facts evolve and change.You could say our understanding of evolution is evolving!
Early, ape-like man was a brutish beast, only slightly more advanced than his ape cousin. Communication between humans occurred primarily through gestures and grunts. There was no such thing as spoken language. However, over the course of time, man began to learn how to manipulate the primordial grunts to make them sound differently. At first, the level and the pitch of the grunt was used to signify different actions, and as the early hominoids interacted, and learned to interpret the meaning of each other’s grunts, a commonality as to the meaning of certain sounds began to emerge. This is how language began. The sounds man learned to make with his vocal facilities began to take on new tones and pace. Through repetition of these common sounds, primitive language evolved. These sounds evolved differently with different groups of hominoids located in isolated areas. So the meaning of these sounds, and the sounds themselves varied based on the geographical location of isolated pockets of hominoids, thus accounting for the many and varied languages currently in existence in the world.
Early man began to learn how to manipulate his environment and make crude tools and weapons, and eventually learned how to create fire. Because of primitive man’s inability to understand the process through which he came to be, he began to invent myths about beings, or a being greater than himself that was the cause of his existence. These myths evolved in different forms through the localization of the tribes that began to emerge throughout isolated geographical pockets of hominoids. Because of the differences in languages that developed, and the variation of myths, man began to become tribalized, and the tribes became suspicious of each other, and tribal wars began to happen.
The Origin of Concepts of Morality
The early, ape-man did not start out with any sense of morality, or right and wrong. He was simply interested in eating, reproducing, and surviving. That is the way nature works. One species eats another species. Many species have to reproduce in large quantities, because most of the offspring will be eaten by other species. The original single cell organisms, from which all life on this planet evolved, survived by eating each other. Amoeba cannibalism has been well documented. Anthropologists have discovered this by examining the petrified fecal matter of single cell organisms.
As tribal wars increased, the early humans noticed that after the wars, (usually over territorial hunting rights,) that some members of their tribes were dead. They reasoned that dead people don’t breed, hunt or make effective warriors, so a primitive sense that killing was not beneficial for the survival of the tribe began to emerge. This idea did not evolve out of any inherent sense that killing was morally wrong, but that it hindered the tribe’s ability to survive. They also noticed that during the tribal wars, the prevailing tribe would take things that belonged to the defeated tribe. These things, such as clubs, spears and animal hides, that were taken by the prevailing tribe, decreased the defeated tribe’s ability to hunt, and wage war, thus threatening their survival. So a sense that taking things that belonged to others, began to evolve into the concept that what we refer to as stealing, was something that humans should not do.
Many other concepts began to evolve in the mind of primitive man in matters that they perceived as a threat to their survival. As primitive males and females paired off for mating purposes, they began to become possessive of their mates, seeing them as the means of reproducing. It became taboo for humans to copulate outside of the relationship with the other human with which they had bonded for the purpose of reproduction. This was seen as a threat to their ability to reproduce their own offspring. Thus, the early concept of fidelity emerged.
Coupled with the early myths invented by primitive man in regards to this phantom “god” to which they accredited their origin, these ideas of “right” and “wrong” which began to develop, formed a kind of tribal religion. Early man did not have science as we know it today, so they began to imagine that this “god” was somehow concerned with their behavior, and would punish them for not adhering to these taboos about things they considered detrimental to their survival. This is how religion began.
Government
As the early hominoids began to move about on the earth, a tribal hierarchy began to emerge, in which the hominoids that were more proficient at manipulative behavior and deceptive vocalization, rose up to become the tribal leaders. This is how our modern concept of government evolved. Some of the tribal rulers proclaimed absolute power, and demanded the hominoid population obey their commands. Those who didn’t were often either killed or imprisoned. Others simply convinced the general hominoid population that if they would all share their possessions, for the enrichment of the prominent hominoids, that community would be maintained in a more civil manner. Oddly enough, over the course of mankind’s evolution, this aspect of man’s existence has not significantly changed.
How We Arrived at Where We are Now
As early man evolved, he just got better and better through the process of evolution. His skeletal structure began to change, and become more like modern day humans. His brain capacity grew, and he learned how to make more complicated stuff. And the stuff he made also evolved. Things got better and better until he arrived at where we are now. We now know that since the process of evolution never stops, that mankind, along with all of the other living things on this planet, will just continue to get better, and there will be no end to it. Things will evolve on the trajectory of betterment forever. So, no matter how bad things in life may “seem” at times, we know that, through the process of evolution, each day for the human race will be better than the one before, each generation will be better than the one before. Plants and animals will just get better and better. Apes will never be men, but, they will be fantastic apes. Of these facts we can be sure. While we, as individual members of the human race will all eventually die, and cease to exist forever, we can take comfort in the knowledge that, because of the beauty of evolution, the human race as a whole, and all that exists will continuously get better, until it all ends in death, because the same process that started it, will end it. Once the exploding atom has reached the limits of the expansion trajectory, it will contract, and go back to its original microscopic state.
Conclusion
I am thankful for the time that I got to spend on that limb in my early years. That was the beginning of my search for the meaning of life. That is where my journey began, in my quest for the truth to the answers to the meaning of life. I have no idea what ever became of (name omitted intentionally). I hope that I have clarified these matters for others. It has been my pleasure. Now you know!
Danny's Stump 