A Great Story | preGenesis Mystery Cache
A Great Story | preGenesis
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CACHE LOCATED AT N44°AB.CDE
W88°FG.HIJ
This series is dedicated to a real Wizard
of the sciences who inspires our youth to think about the physics
of natural laws in unique and engaging ways, our own Professor
Gizmo. I have been inspired by Giz's caches since the very
beginning and this tribute is a long time coming and part of the
reason it is a series and not just a single
cache.
What better place to start then at the very beginning? Anybody with
an inclination towards discovery likely finds the theories of the
origin of the universe as fascinating as I do. But then, I watch
NOVA quite a bit and am a sucker for anything that deals with the
ever expanding universe, dark matter and the age-old question about
where it, and hence we, came from.
The basis of the Big Bang model of the development of the universe
is scientifically founded on the formulations of Alexander
Friedmann, reliant upon Einstein's theory of general relativity,
and later substantiated by Edwin Hubble's discovery in ADFD that distances to far away galaxies were
proportional to their redshifts. Indeed these discoveries were
preceded by Vesto Slipher's first measurements of the Doppler Shift
of a spiral nebula in HGHF after
which he soon discovered that almost all nebulae were receding from
earth. A few years later, the Belgian physicist, Lemaître,
suggested that since the universe was uniformly expanding, you
could reverse the expansion, backward in time, to a point where
everything contracted to a single primeval atom. Prior to this
nothing existed, in fact there is no "prior". Yet, with all of
there postulations and theories being bandies about, the phrase,
"Bing Bang", didn't actually appear until Fred Hoyle used it in a
AGCG radio broadcast.
Now, it's tough to get a handle on concepts like millions and
billions of years. They are too large to conceptualize so they tend
to remain abstractions. To help us see our story as a whole, from
the "big bang" to the present, imagine our 15 billion year
history compressed into one hundred years (google this). At
this timescale, each decade equals 1 billion, 500 million years,
while each second equals 5 years.
If we put the fireball, or "big bang," at one second after midnight
on January 1st, Year 1, with today being one second before midnight
on December 31st of the 99th year, then the first atomic elements,
hydrogen and helium, formed two days after the beginning of the
Universe and galaxies began forming by the hundred billions when it
was about 7 years old.
Our solar system formed from the elemental stardust of a previously
exploded supernova when the Universe was E0. The third planet out from the Sun, Earth,
was at the right distance to allow liquid water to exist, and had
the right amount of gravity to allow atoms to form communities of
molecules. As Earth cooled, it formed a crust around its molten
core, like a film on cooling pudding. The vapor from its boiling
interior rose upward, cooled, and formed clouds. When the surface
temperature dropped below the boiling point of water, it rained for
aeons, and formed a planetary womb, the oceans. The planet came
alive in the seas, in the spring of EJ, with bacteria. Bacteria are the most
important expression of planetary life. All other forms of life are
totally dependent upon them. Bacteria would do just fine without
us; we would not last a day without them.
Planet Earth learned to consume the Sun, by way of photosynthesis,
by the Universe's 7Ith birthday.
Things went smoothly until the great pollution crisis of 88, when
oxygen, a gas deadly to anaerobic bacteria, poisoned the atmosphere
and threatened the continued existence of life. This first
environmental crisis was solved by way of a process of cooperation
and mutual benefit, or symbiosis. The first plants achieved
multicellularity in March of 91. As cells gathered together and
committed themselves to one another, they found, in community, that
their own survival and development was enhanced. The innovation of
sexual reproduction two years later, in March of 93, made possible
an enormous leap in planetary creativity.
In September of 94, some creatures began consuming other creatures
instead of feeding directly off the Sun. This practice made it
possible to have an ecosystem, a biological community. The
development of the nervous system and brain, in worms, happened in
July of 9B. Backbones appeared a
year later. Living beings came ashore, for the first time, in
February, 97. The plants were first, followed soon by the insects.
The first amphibians emerged four months later. Reptiles and
coniferous trees both came into existence in December of 97. The
dinosaurs appeared in May of 98. They became extinct a year later
when planet Earth was hit by a comet off the coast of what is today
Mexico. Mammals began to nurse their young in August of 98. The
first birds diverged from the dinosaurs four months later, a year
ago, on the last day of December in the Universe's 98th year.
During the first week of April, 99, 8 months ago, the planet
exploded with color due to the ecstatic celebration of flowering
plants. Our ancestors, the primates, began monkeying around only a
few months ago. The earliest ape/humans, walking upright, appeared
less than two weeks ago, on December 20th. The first species to get
classified as fully human, Homo habilis, appeared in Africa on
December 26th. Human beings domesticated fire during the early
morning hours of December 29th. Our species, Homo sapiens, is a
very recent expression of the Milky Way galaxy — emerging
from the life of the planet only twenty-four hours ago, at the
beginning of the 365th day of the Universe's 99th year of
existence.
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)