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. 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.   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 beca

  So what is  microbe ?  Another term is microorganism, those tiny living things too small to be seen by the naked eye.  Is a virus a microbe?  Yes.  Is it alive?  That remains debatable.  As we have recently been overcome by just one, COVID-19, thought I'd deviate from the script and say few more things about viruses: Is the smallest of microbes. Walter Reed discovered the first human virus, a yellow fever virus, in 1901.  He proved that this ailment was transmitted by the bite of a mosquito.  That hospital in the DC area is named after him. 500 million rhinoviruses ( cause the common cold ) could fit on the head of a pin. There are ten viruses for every bacterium or archaeon. However,  viruses are 1000 times smaller  than bacteria or archaea. Some of you might not have previously heard of archaea, for Carl Woese only  discovered it in 1977 . Antonio van Leeuwenhoek discovered bacteria in 1676. As this is science day, a few more bits of info about  bacteria and archaea . They are