THE THREE GRAND MIRACLES...LEADING TO US

My posting today is all about those three grand miracles that led to us, Homo sapiens today.  You either believe in religious creationism or science, for how we humans came to be.  This posting will focus on the latter.

• The history of guessing the age of Planet Earth and the Universe goes back to the beginning of our species, and in the early 18th century, was only speculated to be on the order of millions of years old.
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  The first scientific theories began to appear around the time of the U.S. Civil War.
• Until as recently as 1999, astronomers thought the age of our universe was between 7 and 20 billion years old
• In 1929 Edwin Hubble observed that the universe was expanding.  So the thinking was, if space is expanding, what if we trace backwards to the beginning.  

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  It was a Catholic priest and Belgian cosmologist, Georges Lemaitre, who in 1931 published an original paper on this subject.
• But Miracle #1, the Big Bang, was coined in 1949 by a British astrophysicist who in time became Sir Fred Hoyle, even though he himself had some doubts about the concept.

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  It was not until 1958, when I graduated from high school, that Allan Sandage came up with the Hubble Constant, estimating that the oldest known star was close to 14.5 billion years old.

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  The microwave cosmic background radiation was discovered in 1965, a low level noise from the Big Bang, offering another clue.
• Space probes--WMAP in 2001 and Planck in 2009--led to refinement of the Hubble constant, arriving at 13.772 and 13.813 billion years, respectively.
• A decade later, the current estimated age of our universe is 13.787 plus or minus 0.02 billion years.

So let me summarize what happened from Miracle #1 to the present.

In time stars, planets and galaxies formed.  Nothing particularly special there.  However one gigantic step around 3.5 billion years ago was the rather sudden presence of bacteria and archaea, which is Miracle #2:  the emergence of life.

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  In 1952, Stanley Miller (left), supervised by Harold Urey at the University of Chicago, concocted a primordial soup by combining methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen in a reaction vessel, subjecting the combo to continual sparks to simulate lightning.  The result was the production of amino acids.
• Miller followed up with another experiment in 1958 not widely recognized, adding cyanamide to the mix, but did not bother to analyze the results.

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  When Miller in 2007 passed away, a former graduate student, Jeffrey Bada, inherited Miller's samples, and in 2011, his student Eric Parker (right), found 22 amino acids five amines and 10 dipeptides.

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  There have been numerous abiogenesis experiments, and one, in 2021 conducted by Spanish-Italian scientists, added silicates to refine the effort.

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  Others are also trying, as for example, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Craig Venter Institute.
• A recent summary regarding the origin of life on Earth.

• Abiogenesis means spontaneous generation, but clearly there were linked chemical steps that evolved to allow for that one fabulous Miracle #2.  However, no life has yet been created in a lab.  

Life began as bacteria or archaea 3.5 billion years ago.  The two are somewhat similar, but archaea were only discovered in 1977 and tend to survive best in harsh environments.  It is not clear which one came first.

Here is how we came to be through evolution, which can be considered to be Miracle #3, intelligent life that changed Planet Earth, and looms to conquer the Universe.

That elongated graphic above shows a hand, representing humans evolving 1.8 million years ago.  A recent study, though, indicated that an ape-man called Sahelanthropus tchadensis, began to walk upright in Africa more than 7 million years ago.  This is an important enhancement because bipedalism led to bigger brains to better control now freed-up forelimbs.  Plus, walking is more efficient than climbing, allowing you to forage when the climate changes.  Thus came us today.

While we await proof for Miracle #2, an equally intriguing experiment would be to recreate Miracle #1, the Big Bang, in a laboratory.  What was the nature of matter and energy at time zero?  Nearly a decade ago, again at the University of Chicago, Cheng Chin conducted an experiment.  Nothing much developed.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Europe, which discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, might well be on the verge of smashing heavy ions, which could lead to quarks and gluons, thought to have existed shortly after the Big Bang. This would be getting close to mimicking what happened nearly 14 billion years ago.

By 2050 CERN is planning for the Future Circular Collider at a cost of $24 billion to prove the existence of dark matter and maybe spark a Big Bang.  But will this just wipe out Planet Earth and re-initiate the parade of miracles, leading to a new form of intelligence tens of billion years into the future?

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