John L Pearson

In the beginning, I went to work for the Douglas Aircraft Company…

Well, I guess we don’t need all that. Suffice it to say, in my travels through the late 20th Century Aerospace, I met a fellow engineer named Doyle Lockwood. And what an engineer! He is a very thorough, careful and studious guy. Despite his disclaimers, rest assured that the material that follows has been carefully considered, studied and phrased, and accurately reflects the consensus thinking at the close of the 20^th Century. .

As we engineers fell into retirement, we stayed in touch using a tool of the times, the computer. A particular network evolved out of a group of old Douglas, McDonnell-Douglas, and, yes, Boeing engineers, who had worked together over their careers. The network was labeled the ROFs.

Over the last six months or so, Doyle e-mailed the ROFs a series of articles summarizing his reading and study of the origin of the universe, of our galaxy, of our solar system, and the evolution of life on earth.

When he offered me the whole series, I jumped at the chance to reread it, and decided to preserve it. In the course of laying it out I tried to be invisible, just running a spell checker through it. The checker gagged mostly on proper names and technical terms. I did throw in a few hyphens, keeping mind Perrins’ warning about hyphens, quoting Benbow "If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad".

But the thoughts are pure Doyle. Use them well.

A while back I put together an essay about the latest thinking in the scientific community (as well as I can understand it) about how the Universe was created - and how it led to our being here. The scientific stuff is pretty deep and contains much that I don't fully understand, but I just quoted what I have read. To really understand it, one would need to earn a Ph.D. in particle physics and then specialize in that field.

Also, a word about the role of the Creator in all of this. I don't go into that subject, because I don't pretend to have any special insight and it's a matter for each individual to believe what he or she chooses to believe. The essays are really an outline of scientific thought in the late 20th century, as well as I can understand it.

This is an experiment. As most of the ROFs know, I have an itch to understand things and have been interested in astrophysics since I was a teenager. Over the years, I have developed a set of ideas and opinions regarding astrophysics and recently have read several books on evolution as well. The idea was to try to get a better fix on the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. I sometimes jot down my conclusions and impressions as I go, just to keep from forgetting it all. This has made it easy for me to write a series of articles which attempt to explain the process by which you came to be. Be aware that probably not all of the following conclusions are correct as there are many differing opinions in the scientific community. So what we have here is an outline, as well as I can understand it, on scientific thinking in the late 1990s.

Here goes - in twelve short chapters:

How did it ever come to pass that you are here? Well, maybe it was like this:

"Creation is not the work of a moment. When it has once made a beginning with the production of an infinity of substances and matter, it continues in operation through the whole succession of eternity with ever increasing degree of fruitfulness. Millions and whole myriads of millions of centuries will flow on, during which always new worlds and systems of worlds will be formed after each other in the distant regions away from the center of nature, and will attain to perfection." - - - IMMANUEL KANT

"The big bang is dead. Long live the Big Bang." The Big Bang theory has been around ever since the Hubble shift was discovered. Other galaxies are racing away from us and the Universe is expanding. The "steady state" theory is long dead. Early Big Bang theories were troubled with violations of physical laws, as we know them.. Within the last ten years, there has been a quiet revolution in the thinking about the beginning of the Universe. There was even an attempt, (I believe it was by Science Magazine) to rename the Big Bang and give it a more scientific sounding name. They had a contest and a board was convened to pick the new name. No name submitted was considered to be an improvement, so "Big Bang" will be around for a long time.

How did it happen?

In the beginning .... about 15 billion years ago .... there were only "Higgs fields"!

What's a "Higgs field"? Well, it was named after Peter Higgs of The University of Edinburgh. The elementary particles, before the quarks were formed, were made of Higgs fields. A tiny bundle of Higgs fields exists before it is decided which of the six quarks it will form. A Higgs field is shaped something like a Mexican hat with a dimple in the top.

What's a quark? That's a building block of a subatomic particle, proposed by Murray Gell-Mann in the 60s. A certain combination of quarks will produce a neutron, another combination a proton, etc. These particles are all made up of fields. In fact there is nothing at all in the universe except empty space and fields. You are nothing but empty space and fields. Many types of fields make up everything that exists. We know quite a bit about electrical fields, magnetic fields and gravity fields, but the world of fields that makes up particle physics is less well understood. Where did the Higg's fields come from?

Well, according to quantum theory, it is possible for a digital watch to appear out of a perfect vacuum. It is extremely improbable, but it is possible. OK? That's how Higgs fields appeared. They were just suddenly there.

What was here before that happened?

Well, there was no "before". "Before" implies time and time is only the parameter that relates velocity to the relative positions of elements of mass (or fields), therefore there was no time before there was mass. So, there was no "before". Time began when the universe began. So jillions of tons of matter suddenly appeared out of nothing? No, no. The initial mass of the universe was only a few grams, perhaps half an ounce. That's not quite so hard to take.

How did it get so big? Well, the initial size of this little puddle of Higgs fields was far, far, far smaller than any subatomic particle, but it began to expand. This phase of expansion continued for very short period of time. About 10^-37 seconds. (This is my notation for 1/10000000000000000000000000000000000000 of a second.) During this expansion, the Higgs fields became supercooled - like when water that has dropped below the freezing point, but is still a liquid. It wasn't cold - the temperature was astronomical - but it was below the "freezing point" for that kind of stuff.

Then a new phase began. This new type of expansion was similar to shocking a volume of supercooled water and having it freeze instantly. In other words, there was an abrupt "phase change", such as occurs when water changes from a liquid to a solid.

This caused the tiny puddle of Higg's fields to begin a new process which has been given the name "inflation" by it's inventor, Alan Guth. This phase continued for ten million times as long as the previous phase, but was still only 10^-30 seconds. During this time, the dimensions of the little blob grew to a radius of about one meter, increasing in volume by a factor of 10^25 or ten trillion trillion.

This is quite a change. How come it happened? Well, because of it's shape, a mass of Higgs fields can produce some rather surprising effects. For example, a volume of space filled with Higgs fields can have a negative pressure. This is sometimes called a "false vacuum". If you take a cylinder off of your car, reduce it in size by a few trillion trillion and put it in a perfect vacuum and put a piston in the cylinder and fill the chamber with Higgs fields, the piston will be pulled inward with enormous force. In other words, the Higgs fields exert a strong negative pressure on the top of the piston. So while a vacuum produces a zero pressure, Higgs fields can produce a negative pressure. Sound OK? The strangest thing about this mass of Higgs fields is that if you pull the piston out, the Higgs fields expand to fill the new volume, but the energy density does not change. In other words, the energy (and mass) increase in proportion to the volume.

Well, if the Higgs fields create a negative vacuum and pull the piston in, then what can pull it out? Here we get some help from Dr. Einstein. General relativity says that if you have a volume of gas that produces a given gravity field, then you compress the gas, the strength of the gravitational attraction will increase. (E=MC^2 so if E goes up due to compression, then M must increase also, hence the greater attraction.) Normally this is a trivial effect, but with material that weighs 10^60 grams per cubic centimeter, the effect is large. (Ten to the sixtieth grams is 500 trillion trillion suns - per cubic centimeter - very heavy stuff!)

So it follows that if a positive pressure produces a gravitational attraction, then a negative pressure will produce a gravitational repulsion! I guess that's obvious enough. In this situation, the gravitational repulsion will exceed the attraction by about a factor of three, so the universe expands violently.

"Well, I still don't believe in negative pressure." Now, negative pressure is not that unfamiliar. Think of a stretched rubber band that wants to reduce it's dimensions. Suppose that rubber band reached all the way around the universe, wouldn't it tend to shrink the universe? Wouldn't it look like negative pressure?

Now we have a universe that is about 10^-30 seconds of age and about a yard in radius. Someone is going to say that the expansion exceeds the speed of light and Einstein doesn't permit that. Well, Einstein would not object! The theory of relativity only limits the velocity of objects relative to other objects. Space itself can change dimensions as fast as it wants to and inflation is actually an expansion of space, carrying along the Higgs fields with it. Space has been expanding ever since and may continue to expand forever. Or maybe not. More about this later.

So now we are through "inflation". Most of the leaders in particle physics and astrophysics accept inflation as a "beautiful" and likely a valid theory that is consistent with the known laws of physics and that solves a number of serious problems in astrophysics that existed before Alan Guth came up with the idea.

Now that everyone understands "inflation", in the next chapter we can move on to the rest of the story of how ROFs came to be.

(This narrative contains some pretty bizarre notions, if you are not used to it. All I can say is that many Nobel laureates believe that these ideas are closer to the truth than any theory that has come before and the theory now corresponds to observational data in many ways. Besides, it's clear that something happened. We are here aren't we?)

Well it started with a few grams of Higgs fields appearing out of nothing, then inflating to produce all of the mass in the universe in 10^-30 seconds. So we now have a volume of about a cubic yard. This is probably a good place to talk a bit about the shape of space. We evolved in a world where space seems to be three dimensional, like east, north, and up. It's called Euclidian space. We all think in terms of Euclidian space because our brains are wired that way. That's fine for swinging between the branches of a tree, catching a baseball or guiding a space probe past a planet, but when you are talking about the entire universe, you have to think differently. Space on a grand scale is Riemannian, not Euclidian.

To get a faint feel for what this means, let's take one step down in dimensions and think of a world that seems two dimensional to us, like the surface of the earth. If we could only think of two dimensions, but discovered that if we go far enough in any direction we return to our starting point (by going around the world) this would be very baffling. In other words, if we couldn't visualize three dimensional space, we could not visualize going "around" the world. Well, real space is the same, but at least one order higher in dimension. If you go far enough in ANY DIRECTION, you will return to where you started!

Space is closed upon itself, so with neutral pressure and velocity, it would just sit there, at the same size, indefinitely. Don't think of the universe as expanding into empty space. The Riemannian universe is not a ball, floating around in the surrounding Euclidian space. All of space is inside the Riemannian universe. But the volume can increase. OK?

Why did inflation end? That was a problem for a while, then it was discovered that if the shape of the "Mexican hat" that defines the Higgs field is flattened somewhat, the equations then predict a "graceful exit" from the inflation phase. Some theorists claim that inflation continues to this day, but there is no real evidence of that, as far as I know.

So what happened after "inflation"? Well, it's much easier to follow from here on. The volume continued to expand and by about the age of one second, the Universe had expanded to dimensions of hundreds of thousands of miles, the Higgs fields had formed quarks and the quarks had formed nuclear particles, creating a plasma of protons, neutrons and electrons. (A "plasma" is a gas that is so hot that the electrons cannot maintain their attachments to the atomic nuclei.) For the next two minutes, many protons were banged together hard enough to stick together and form proton pairs, which became helium, about 25% of the mass, in fact. (A little bit of lithium was also created.) That's what theory says and that's what we see when we look at the stars. This is one of the observational check points that lends credibility to all of this theory. From the age of two minutes until about 300,000 years (some say 500,000) the volume expanded and cooled until the electrons began to attach to the protons and form atoms, changing the plasma into a hot gas and permitting the transmission of light through the medium. Remember, the place you sit right now was at the "center" of this mass of hot gas. In fact, every point in the universe was (and is) at the "center". That is one of the strange things about Riemann space. There is no unique "center". Every point is always at the center so you are still at the center today. So when you look in any direction, if you can see far enough, you can see the "center" where you were 15 billion years ago. The light has traveled all the way around and come back to you. Think of it as though light rays were bent to travel around the earth at exactly the curvature of the earth. If you could see far enough, you would be looking at the back of your head, no matter which way you looked. Add another dimension and you have Riemann space, but don't try to visualize it in three dimensions. That would be like trying to draw a map of the entire earth on a flat surface. You just can't do it without ridiculous distortions. And don't try to feature this closed universe sitting in a surrounding Euclidian space that reaches to infinity. There is no Euclidian space outside the Riemannian universe. Space is not infinite. (Some theorists debate this, but their reasoning is based solely on speculation.)

That brings us to the matter of cosmic background radiation. If you look in any direction with the right instrument, you will see a background temperature of about 2.726 degrees Kelvin. This is the radiation from the 300,000 year old fire that has been stretched by the expansion of space for the last 15 billion years.

The mapping and measurements of this cosmic background radiation by the COBE satellite caused many cosmologists to drop their objections to the idea of a "big bang" model of the universe. Quantum theory says that the little puddle of Higgs fields couldn't be perfectly symmetrical. It had to vary by about one part in 100,000. Now when we look at the cosmic background radiation that was emitted at the end of the 300,000 year "cooling off" period, the variation in temperature is about one in 100,000. Also, the spectrum is exactly that of a black body, as predicted by the big bang model. And I do mean "EXACTLY". The data follows a black body curve so closely that it looks phony. This proves that all of the above is true. Right? Well, at least it is very impressive and when the COBE data was first presented, it caused objections to the "big bang" theory to come crashing down all over the world.

But how many laws of physics have been violated? None, of course. Then how could a few grams of matter become the current mass of the universe? If E=MC^2 then a lot of energy has been "created". Now, this will jar you! The net energy in the universe is zero! No energy has been created. Hang on, don't start laughing. It is true that E=MC^2 and M is certainly very large if it is the entire mass of the universe. How can the net energy be zero? The reason is that gravitational fields store negative energy! The negative energy stored in all of the gravity fields of the universe cancels all of the positive energy represented by E=MC^2.

How can a gravity field contain negative energy? Well consider the following "thought experiment". If we have a large mass of some given size, it will possess a gravitational field. If a small mass is located some distance from the large mass and is attached to a spool by a thread wrapped around the spool, we can let the small mass be pulled toward the large mass, turning the spool and generating electricity. It will therefore produce a certain amount of energy from the gravitational field of the large mass before it reaches the surface. Now suppose we use a pump to inflate the large mass, creating a shell of material with essentially empty space inside. We will have done work to do this, since the shell will have been expanded against its own gravitational attraction. Now if we run the experiment with a small mass attached to a string wrapped around a spool again, we are able to produce only a smaller amount of energy, because the small mass cannot descend as far, before reaching the surface of the large mass. That means that the energy stored in the gravity field of the large mass has been reduced. We have done work on the system, but, in essence, have reduced the energy of it's gravitational field. For this to happen, part of the gravitational energy has been canceled out, so it must have had a negative value. (To be canceled by the positive value of the work put into the system.) Troubling, huh? Well, think of it as though you put money into your bank account, only to discover that the new balance is zero. That would mean that the previous balance was negative, just like the negative energy in the gravity field. (Such a notion may take some getting used to.)

Closed, flat or open? There is still a question about whether the universe will eventually stop expanding and fall back together again. This would mean it is "closed". Or it might continue to expand forever, but at an ever decreasing rate, asymptotically approaching zero. This would mean it is "flat". Or it might continue to expand forever, asymptotically approaching a given expansion rate, meaning that it is "open". To be flat, it has to contain about ten times as much mass as it seems to have. But, my impression is that the "flat" universe proponents have the best arguments. I will elaborate if anyone wants me to.

So this volume of superheated gas grew and grew and cooled and cooled for millions of years. It then became so cool that it got dark. The universe would have looked black at the wavelengths that your eyes can see. Cold and dark and black space, filled with a very diffuse mix of hydrogen and helium. Such a disappointing fate. For a while it looked as though we had something going, now all is dark. The ROFs are doomed! They will never be! But then something new began to happen. The rest of the story is pretty complicated, but is more direct, in that it does not contain any more ideas that clash with our "common sense".

I don't want to imply that all of the above is pat and proven and well understood. Far from it. There are over 1000 cosmologists in the world today and I doubt if any two would agree completely with any given scenario. But, there is a lot of evidence that the above theory is at least getting close to reality.

"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead." - Albert Einstein

The universe is now millions of years old and is growing at a rate that is far in excess of the speed of light. (Take a course in space-time physics and you will see that this is OK.) This process will go on for perhaps five billion years, until the atoms that formed during the first few hours have cooled down and spread out to a very low density. The density is now so low, that when you take a breath (where you are now), you inhale a number of atoms that would occupy several times the volume of the earth at the density of our five billion year old universe. On an average, there is about one atom per cubic foot of space in the universe. This is much closer to a perfect vacuum than has ever been created by man. So it is dark and cold and nothing is happening. Stars cannot form out of such tenuous matter. It appears to be the end of the story. Then, how did this large mass of tenuous gas produce the ROFs? I know that some ROFs produce gas, but how could the reverse happen?

Well, for one thing, the density of the gas was not exactly uniform. Remember the one in 100,000 variation in density at the beginning? This caused density variations that produced instabilities. Slightly denser regions became even more dense, due to their tendency to fall together because of gravitational attraction. Also, there was turbulence, due to the quantum variation during the first 10^-37 second. This caused the gas to gradually clump together in huge clouds that were millions of light years across, taking billions of years in the process. These clouds contained varying amounts of angular momentum, due to the turbulence, so as the clouds shrank, some of them spun faster and faster. These clouds eventually became spiral galaxies. Those with less angular momentum formed elliptical galaxies, which are simply large swarms of stars. (Galaxy formation is poorly understood, so you might find other opinions about this.) The galaxies formed clusters and super clusters. There were, and still are, large voids as well as enormous "mass attractors" comprised of swarms of galaxies, so if you map the distribution of galaxies in the universe it will look much like a sponge, on a very large scale, full of holes and webs and membranes.

As each galaxy pulled itself together, and the gas became more dense, local anomalies began to form where the gas fell together at an ever increasing rate and formed a star. Well, not so fast! As the clumps of gas got more and more dense, the shrinking began to slow down, while they were still hundreds of times larger than they would be in their final form! Contrary to the accounts that are usually described in astronomy textbooks, a star doesn't form rapidly by having all of it's material simply fall ballistically together. The heat of compression causes this process to slow down and almost stop, while the star is still much too large and cool for nuclear fusion to take place! Now the star has to lose heat in order to contract further in order to become hotter! I discovered this fact with a simulation I created several years ago and had to search for a year or so to find verification of my model. Finally, I found it in an expensive book on astrophysics that I bought. (This slow shrinking process is significant because it helps to explain how the planets formed.)

These clumps of gas are called "population two" stars, because they contain no heavy elements. Elements heavier that lithium do not yet exist. As the stellar interiors reach a sufficiently high temperature and pressure, the hydrogen begins to be converted into helium by a fusion process which is much too complicated to describe here, but is believed to be well understood. These early stars are formed in many sizes. The heavier stars evolve the most rapidly due to the higher temperatures and pressures in their centers. Eventually, this process begins to produce heavier elements, finally converting much of the core of the star into iron.

When the center of one of these stars becomes sufficiently dense, it becomes impossible for the laws of subatomic physics to resist the pressure of the mass pressing down. The gas at the center becomes "degenerate" and suddenly, (and I do mean suddenly) the core collapses. Within a second or two, the inner region, about 50,000 miles across, shrinks to a volume only a few tens of miles in diameter. Pretty high G forces! The resulting pressure and density causes a wide range of fusion reactions which create most of the heavier elements. Some of these reactions are exothermic, adding to the heat of the process, and others are endothermic, soaking up heat. Hence the elements of the atomic table come into being and huge quantities of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, nickel, gold, zinc, etc, etc, etc. are created.

You probably already know we are talking about a supernova. For a second or two, a supernova produces more energy than all of the rest of the stars in the universe combined. Today, this happens somewhere in the universe about once every second.

As this ball of extremely hot gas starts to expand, it encounters the in falling mass that was left behind when the central region collapsed. This head on collision also produces more heavy elements. Then the rest of the star shatters like a hand grenade. The expanding gas "fractures" the shells of gas that are impeding the outward expansion and the interior gas begins to squirt out between the cracks. (Until recently, it was thought that the star simply expanded uniformly, but now it is known that the expansion is more of a disintegration.) At the center is left a rapidly spinning, city sized, neutron star which may also be "pulsar", spinning at up to thousands of revolutions per second.

So the gas blown away by the supernova explosion contains heavy elements that can later form planets, atmospheres and ROFs. The debris from these supernova explosions spreads outward at a significant fraction of the speed of light, until it is slowed down by the ambient interstellar gas that is still a part of the galaxy. Eventually the products of these events will form GMCs. (Giant Molecular Clouds - you probably saw some stunning pictures of these GMCs taken by the Hubble telescope.) Within these GMCs, new instabilities will form, possibly due to the effects of shock waves caused by later supernova explosions, due to galactic collisions, or just due to compression waves traveling through the arms of the galaxies. These instabilities will produce the "population one" stars that contain heavy elements. (Obviously, they got it backwards. Before the process was understood, the two populations were recognized and the old first generation stars, containing mainly hydrogen, were given the name "population two" and the younger second generation stars, containing heavy elements, were called "population one".)

One or more of these supernova explosions produced the atoms that we are made of. It even produced the atoms that Dub is made of. (It was a really, really big star.) But I am getting ahead of my story.

Well, now we have formed a universe, made galaxies, made stars, exploded the stars making heavy elements and begun to form new stars that contain the elements needed to make planets and life. The process that led to the planets is complicated and, of course, there are many differing opinions. I believe that the best arguments are made by those who believe that what happened was something like this: The giant molecular clouds (GMCs) formed in the plane of the galaxy. You can easily see one with a pair of inexpensive binoculars. If you know how to spot the constellation Orion, look in the vicinity of the hunter's sword. It is a row of three stars extending downward from the "waist" of the constellation. You will see what looks like the mouth of a cave, with an eerie glow about it. This is a GMC and stars are being born there. The temperature within such a cloud is typically only about ten degrees Kelvin, very cold, but there were density variations that caused parts of the cloud to begin to fall together due to gravitational attraction, similar to the way the galaxies originally formed. As this ball of gas shrunk and got denser and warmer, atoms banged together forming molecules, then as the temperature rose, the molecules began to stick together and form dust particles, but most of the mass was still hydrogen and helium with small amounts of other gasses, such as water vapor and methane. As this ball of gas, often called the "proto solar nebula", pulled itself together, the outer regions warmed up to the temperature of liquid water. The water molecules collected on particles of dust, then froze, to become the makings of comets. Thus, the comets were formed in what is called the Oort cloud, far beyond the orbit of Pluto. As the spin rate increased due to the reducing radius of the cloud, the disk of gas flattened into a somewhat oblate spheroid. This flattened spheroidal cloud was irregular and turbulent at first, but with time, and there was a lot of time, viscous damping caused it to settle down into a fairly stable and calm ball of gas, laced with heavier atoms from the supernova explosion. Most of the elements of the periodic table were present, but the most abundant were the silicon and iron.

Now this is a fairly key point: An element of gas, being buoyant, would follow an essentially circular path around the polar spin axis. Even the components that were not in the equatorial plane would follow circular paths in planes perpendicular to the polar axis of the proto sun. These elements of gas would be held above or below the equatorial plane by their buoyancy. Think of it as a large puffy mass, rotating pretty much as a single body. It would be essentially symmetrically about its spin axis. Anyway, there would be little motion of the gas ALONG the polar axis. So while the gas cloud is behaving essentially as a rigid body, rotating about it's polar axis, each element of gas is affected by both its buoyancy and the gravitational attraction of the entire mass.

Then, as further shrinking gradually caused higher temperatures and pressures the particles of dust stuck together, forming larger grains of material, then clumps of material. The dust would pretty much follow the motions of the gas, but as the clumps got heavier and tried to follow Keplerian paths, those clumps located away from the equatorial plane would behave as Keplerian objects in inclined orbits. But, because of the gas cloud, they would have their movements PARALLEL to the spin axis of the gas cloud dampened by the drag of passing through the cloud. In other words, the relatively dense globs would tend to settle toward the equatorial plane. They might oscillate back and forth a few times, or could be over damped and just settle toward the equator, depending on the ambient gas density and the sectional density of the globs. (Flight mechaniker stuff, for sure.) In any event this caused the heavier material to concentrate in a very thin disk at the center of the more puffy gas cloud, called an "accretion disk".

Another key factor was the tendency of the clumps to try to follow higher velocity Keplerian orbits, while the gas would orbit more slowly due to the buoyancy forces. In other words, as dense material collected into globs, it would have a tendency to fall into lower orbits than the light material which is carried along with the gas cloud because of it's buoyancy. Of course the larger the chunk of material, the stronger this tendency. This would produce a "sweeping" effect, where the larger chunks would sweep up the smaller particles as their orbits decay relative to the ambient gas. The larger they got, the faster they grew and also the larger they got, the more they would refuse to follow the path of the surrounding buoyant gas.

Now, if this isn't confusing enough, as they get still larger, they begin to ignore the effects of the gas cloud completely and simply stay in the orbits they had reached. Now another sweeping effect begins, as smaller objects, still de-orbiting due to the drag of the gas cloud, overtake the larger planets. Either way, the planets continue to grow. (A group in Japan has done a lot of work on this theory. I believe they are on the right track.)

Another way to look at this is that there were two types of material orbiting the center of the proto sun, buoyant material (gas) and non-buoyant material (solids). The buoyant material would be attracted toward the center of the proto sun by a gravitational attraction of the mass inside its orbit minus the effects of buoyancy while the solid objects would essentially only see the gravitational attraction. The resulting difference between the two paths would create the "sweeping effect" that enables larger bodies to capture smaller bodies more efficiently than if it were happening in a vacuum. (If Bill Haney or another flight mechaniker can put this in clearer words, I would appreciate it.)

The mutual attraction of the growing masses would also cause perturbations in their quasi Keplerian orbits, leading to many shattering collisions, producing billions of asteroids, planetoids and meteoroids. Most of them have been swept up again, some are still falling today. Some theorists believe that a complete set of planets was formed, then destroyed this way. I doubt it, but the fact that some were destroyed is evidenced by the fact that some meteorites contain diamonds, presumably formed only under very high pressure.

All of this is happening while the gas cloud is shrinking under the influence of gravity, losing heat so that it can shrink, so that it can get hotter, as mentioned earlier. Obviously, the gas cloud shrank faster than the planets deorbited, else we wouldn't be here. Some models indicate that indeed, some planets, inferior to Mercury, may have been engulfed by the sun.

When the outer planets were left behind by the sun, the outer regions were still cool enough for water and ice to exist, so they became essentially huge balls of water, though no doubt they have cores of earthlike iron and silicates. By the time the sun had shrunk to the radius of Mars, it was getting too hot for this to happen so the remaining planets, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury are basically made of iron and silicates.

I believe that most of this happened while the planets were still imbedded in the gas cloud that was to become the sun. Some astronomers believe that the gas cloud shrank first, then the heavy chunks collected together to form the planets. There are several reasons that I believe the planets formed WITHIN the gas cloud, but this thing is getting too long to permit me to go into the pros and cons. As indicated earlier, this whole area has not settled down so that there is a generally accepted scenario, but I believe a consensus is slowly emerging around the above set of ideas. Probably the largest dispute is whether the major planets formed due to accretion (as described) or due to gravitational collapse. I believe the accretion advocates have the best arguments.

To me, it helps a little to visualize a 1 to 5 billion scale model of the solar system. In this model, the sun is the size of a basket ball. The earth is slightly smaller than a BB, one hundred feet away. Clearly, it would take a while to scoop up most of the material between Venus and Mars. It probably took about 100 million years for the planets to form and for the sun to shrink to it's present size.

So now we have an earth. But it's not a nice place. In fact it's a hellish place.

So far we have had the big bang, formed galaxies, formed stars and formed the earth.

What kind of a place is it? It's pure hell! By the time the sun has shrunk to the radius of Mars and the other terrestrial planets, its temperature is between 1000 and 2000 degrees F and the earth is still within it's envelope of hot gas. Even after the gas ball shrinks further, the surface of the sun is not far away and occupies a large part of the sky. The sun probably goes through a "Hayashi phase", in which convection brings the superheated interior gasses to the surface, resulting in a period of greatly increased luminosity, scorching the earth still more. The temperature of the earth is well above the melting point of rock, so it is a ball of molten lava. A fiery, screaming, roaring, boiling, grinding, thundering blast furnace. The sky is full of poisonous gasses such as sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. There is some water present, but of course it is in the form of steam. There is no free oxygen.

The surface is a boiling mass of lava as the trapped gasses produced by chemical reactions within the earth make their way to the surface, producing fountains of lava, gas and dust, riddled with lightning bolts. As if this isn't bad enough, additional heat is released by the array of chemical reactions taking place below the surface, as well as nuclear decay of unstable isotopes and "differentiation".

(Differentiation is the process of the heavier materials sinking toward the center of the earth, releasing their gravitational energy.)

Also, millions of asteroids, meteoroids and comets come plunging in from space, showering the earth with more fire and debris, just to make it more exciting.

What a mess! Things had reached this state about 4.6 billion years ago. How can the ROFs live here? It will be a long time before children can run through peaceful green meadows and we have already used up ten billion years since the Big Bang, just to produce a boiling ball of lava. Clearly the Creator had a lot of patience.

But things do gradually improve as hundreds of millions of years roll by. The sun continues to shrink and after ten to one hundred million years assumes a size and temperature similar to what it is today, permitting the earth to begin to cool off. But it's really a hot mama, surrounded by an atmospheric green house that impedes the cooling off process. (Although this may have been tempered by a "nuclear winter" effect because of the masses of dust thrown into the sky by the multitude of volcanic events.) The surface continues to boil and out gas for eons, but finally, after about 600 million years, has cooled down to the point that liquid water can condense and patter down on the hot, solidified lava and be turned back into steam again.

Volcanoes are still everywhere and huge plates of solidified rock grind against each other due to the turbulent movement of the molten lava below. Indeed, this still goes on today, at a much slower pace, and is called "plate tectonics".

Sometime during this period, another major event occurred, which was to continue to have a major influence on the earth to this day. Something about the size of Mars came careening in and gave the earth a sideswipe. It took a large piece out of the earth and was itself shattered into millions of fragments. A lot of the debris of the interloper and part of the surface of the earth was hurled into space. (The shattering of this object may explain the presence of diamonds in meteorites, mentioned in the last chapter.) A mass equal to about 1/80th of the earth was thrown beyond the "Roche's limit" where it could reform into a single body again. This is the moon. Much of the debris from the collision fell back to earth, much was thrown into solar orbit and impacted the earth later and no doubt some of it reached Venus and Mars. Some of it is still out there and may come back to surprise us some day in the future. (This theory of the formation of the moon is not proven, but it is the favored theory at the moment due to a number of simulations that appear to confirm that it could have happened. Also, the chemistry of the moon would appear to support the theory. After a long period of doubt, I also believe it is the most likely explanation for the presence of the moon. All other theories proposed so far seem to have fallen victim to inescapable contradictions with observable facts.)

Initially, the moon was about one tenth as far away as it is today. It has been receding ever since it formed, due to the tidal transfer of angular momentum from the earth to the moon. The current "regression rate", as measured by the laser reflectors left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, is about 1.5 inches per year. The spin rate of the earth is slowing down as the moon moves away and the days are getting longer by about 1/100 of a second per century. (I find this easy to believe, because they certainly seem longer to me as time passes.)

It would be interesting if one of our flight mechanikers would check to see if these two numbers (1.5 inches per year and 1/100 of a second per century) agree. Also, what would be the equivalent thrust pushing the moon forward in its orbit? Once, long ago, I calculated 30,000,000 pounds, if my memory is right. Eventually, due to this process of tidal regression, in about 15 billion years the moon may escape the earth and wander off into it's own heliocentric orbit. Then it may come back on a collision course! More trouble for the poor old earth! But the earth should have been cremated by the sun by then because the sun will have become a red giant, so don't worry. Anyway, that's the future and I want to talk about the past.

So, back to the earth itself. Once it became cool enough, water could condense and rain could fall on the hot surface. Further cooling permitted puddles to form, then lakes and finally oceans of water, though most of the land probably resembled the geyser basins at Yellowstone. At least one researcher believes that a large fraction of the present water on the earth came from comet impacts and that the process continues today. I am skeptical of that theory because it doesn't allow for the fact that Venus is so dry and we don't see the comets entering the atmosphere and we don't see strikes taking place on the moon. I believe most of the water was here from the start, though it took a long time for it boil up from inside and then to condense and fall to the surface. When the oceans did form, the moon was still very close, as mentioned above, and the tides were perhaps half a mile high. Giant tidal waves swept across the lava fields that covered continents twice a day (and it was a much shorter day) , washing much debris back into the oceans. This process evaporated enormous amounts of water, causing torrential storms over practically all of the earth, all the time.

And in other ways, it was still not a good place to live. There was no free oxygen in the atmosphere, therefore there was no ozone and the ultraviolet radiation from the sun was able to strike the surface unimpeded.

The atmosphere was mostly methane, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Not good stuff to breath. What a mess! The earth is already nearly a billion years old and there is still no air to breath, the oceans are wild with thundering tidal waves that sweep across the land and much of the land is still hot and spotted with active volcanoes.

The big bang made the universe, clouds of gas formed galaxies and stars, stars exploded into gas clouds salted with new, heavy elements that collapsed into new stars and formed planets. The earth cooled off and oceans formed, but there was no free oxygen. ROFs can't live without oxygen, so something has to be done.

What we need is a way to free the oxygen atoms from the carbon dioxide; there is plenty of that. This will also permit an ozone layer to form and shield us from the ultra violet radiation from the sun so that life can form. But we need life in order to free the oxygen atoms from the carbon dioxide. There can be no life without an ozone layer and there can be no ozone layer without free oxygen and there can be no free oxygen without a life form to separate it from the CO2. Checkmate. The earth will stay this way forever! You don't exist! Sorry about that.

Well, maybe there's hope. It is now about 3.6 billion years ago and the earth is one billion years old. There are oceans and lakes and bare rocks. There are also many volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes. A billion years old and still a mess! We need more time for things to cool down, but in particular we need an oxygen separator.

The most simple living cell is about as complicated as a digital computer. It couldn't just happen to fall together by chance. And if it did, and it would have to happen in the water and it would have to stay at least thirty feet beneath the surface or the UV radiation would kill it. Also, it would die of old age, or some kind of poisoning, and that would be the end of it unless it learned to reproduce itself; another considerable challenge. It probably couldn't happen and we are not really here at all.

But it did! Life began. How it began depends upon the definition of life that you prefer. If it is the ability to reproduce itself, then the first life was probably the "phospholipids". That was a very simple little "thing", looking like a tiny hollow bubble of molecules of fatty acid. It was able to incorporate additional molecules and grow, then divide into two bubbles which in turn could add new molecules and grow. Did these tiny vesicles constitute "life"? I don't think so. Soap bubbles can grow and divide, but they are not alive. That's all the phospholipids could do. There was no way for them to evolve. A dead end! I don't mean to denigrate the phospholipids. They are still around and make up more than 50% of the material contained in our cell membranes. But, back then, they didn't seem to hold much promise.

This was the situation while another 1.4 billion years rolled by. That's a long time to wait for something new to happen. Of course the surface of the earth was evolving and becoming more calm and stable, but not much was happening in the way of developing life on earth. An observer would surely give up and conclude that a ROF could never be. The oceans contained vast quantities of phospholipids, but they were all pretty much alike. Then, finally, something new happened. It isn't clear why, but a cell, similar to a phospholipid appeared but it wasn't just an empty bubble. It had a nucleus! Within the tiny vesicle was the basic structure of a DNA molecule. And it could reproduce itself! It could change and become more complex and still reproduce itself! Now this is "big medicine". When I think about it, I get a shiver! These new cells were to become known as "prokaryotes". They started something that would lead to geraniums, differential equations, airliners, nuclear physics, space probes, Baywatch and ROFs.

How did it happen? The laws of probability seem to say it couldn't. There is an old saying that if an infinite number of monkeys are playing with typewriters, one of them will write Gone With the Wind. But if you multiply the number of cubic millimeters of ocean water by the number of seconds in a billion years, and you have that many monkeys, that still won't provide enough opportunities for one to write Gone With the Wind, or for something as complex as a DNA molecule to form by chance. But maybe this is what happened: Using the monkey analogy, suppose a large number of them happen to produce single words from Gone With the Wind. That's not too unlikely. And suppose these "words" have a durability that enables them to survive while most of the nonsense words disappear. Then another set of monkeys learn to play around with arranging the words and a large number of them produce sentences of Gone With the Wind, and they too have a survival advantage over the nonsense sentences. Other sets of monkeys assemble the sentences into paragraphs and similarly into chapters and another monkey gets all of the chapters in the right order. In a way, this is Darwin at work on a submicroscopic scale. It's a theory that has been proposed by Nobel laureate, Manfred Eigen, at the Max Plank Institute where he has performed laboratory experiments that appear to support it. Of course, the theory may or may not be correct. But somehow living cells came to be. They could live and reproduce themselves, but that was about all they could do, and they were very delicate, because they were unable to store a means of nourishment.

Then a mutation took place and some of these tiny cells developed the ability to use the energy from sunlight to separate carbon from oxygen, then store the carbon atoms for later use. This was a huge survival advantage and these cells spread around the world. They are still around. They are called cyanobacteria. You have seen them as a green "slime" on the surface of a stagnant pond. There are about 3000 varieties of cyanobacteria and they are still separating carbon from oxygen.

This was an essential step toward creating a livable planet because the cyanobacteria had no use for the oxygen atoms that were freed when the carbon dioxide molecule was broken down. The oxygen atoms were released into the environment.

So could the freed oxygen now form the ozone layer? Well no, sorry, not yet. There was another problem. The environment was loaded with iron atoms. They were everywhere and iron atoms love to latch onto oxygen atoms. Iron rusts, right? So every oxygen atom that was freed by the cyanobacteria was soon trapped again as ferrous oxide. Drive through southern Utah and look at the red hills, or through Georgia and look at the red clay. Those, and many other sites around the world, are where the oxygen ended up for another half a billion years. God needed an enormous amount of patience to get things squared away in order to make a few ROFs. "Time out of mind" was required to make this planet a decent place to live. Finally, the free iron was pretty well used up and free oxygen began to stay in the atmosphere, and eventually form the ozone layer.

During these eons, while the cyanobacteria was doing its work, other types of cells had come into being through reproductive mutations. This is when a cell is modified by some type of high energy particle, or photon, or an "accident" occurs in the process of copying the DNA from a cell into the new DNA of it's offspring. So we now had various types of living cells.

Then another amazing event occurred. Two different types of cell found that they could join together in a mutually beneficial relationship. The DNA molecules soon incorporated the instructions to duplicate these cell pairs and they began to reproduce as multi-celled organisms. Soon, other cells would join the party, forming organized assemblies of cells. These organizations had improved survival chances, but they still couldn't live near the surface of the water. They had to stay at least 30 feet deep, or under layers of muck, until the ozone layer was formed. Then they could come to the surface.

Ages of oxygen release by cyanobacteria has finally produced atmospheric oxygen and the ozone layer, permitting cellular life to exist near the surface of the oceans without being cooked by the ultra violet radiation.

These assemblies of cells contained genes defined by their alleles (that we heard so much about during the Simpson trial). When these alleles were copied, occasional accidents would occur, resulting in mutations. Many of these mutations were harmful, some did no good and no harm and a few were useful. They produced characteristics that improved the chances of survival and reproduction. For example, certain cells began to have the ability to change shape. This let the little blobs of protoplasm move around. Then other cells began to be sensitive to light. The precursor to eyes was invented.

Then another key event occurred - a new type of cell began to communicate with both the light sensitive cells and the "muscle" cells. These cells could accept information from the light sensitive cells and give orders to the muscle cells. This was the beginning of an entirely new type of organism, called the "brain". This let the little blobs move in a favorable direction, relative to the light, thereby increasing the chances of survival. The earliest ones probably used this ability to stay deep underwater and avoid the ultra violet. Then later it became of benefit to move nearer the surface in order to use the energy from the sun to generate needed proteins. Microscopic life forms with these abilities still exist today.

Mutational accidents of all kinds continued to occur when cells failed to reproduce themselves accurately and those that were helpful were statistically more likely to be passed on, while those that were neutral or harmful were statistically less likely to be passed on. This process finally produced a man named Charles Darwin, who figured out what had happened.

It has been said that evolution requires three ingredients: (1) conservation, (2) variation and (3) selection. The conservation is necessary in order to retain the benefits of preceding evolution, variation is necessary in order to try out new features and selection is the statistical process of enhanced survival and reproduction due to the favorable, though accidental, new features.

For this process to work, however, another invention was required. This new invention became not only very popular (and remains so until this day) but was absolutely essential. It is called "sex". Why was sex so important? Think of it this way. If you start with a thousand little critters and one of them produces an offspring that has a genetic advantage over the others, there needs to be a way for the offspring of the other 999 critters to benefit, as opposed to only the direct descendants of the lucky one. Since it's a statistical game, for the good fortune to be significant, it must have many, many opportunities to show it's merits. This can only happen if the new gene spreads through the population. So sex became essential to evolution. Without it, we would still be little transparent blobs of jelly like stuff, swishing around in the ocean.

This process of genetic mutation driven evolution began about 2.5 billion years ago. At first these tiny life forms were microscopic jellyfish, then some began to improve their mobility by developing streamlined shapes, with the light sensitive cells on the front end, some developed organized mouths to eat the others with, both internal and external skeletons were invented and by 600 million years ago, at the beginning of the Cambrian era, the most sophisticated creature in the world was a thumb sized little critter called a trilobite. But it was a hard shelled creature and was not one of our ancestors, though it might have shared a common ancestor with us in the more distant past.

Also, by the beginning of the Cambrian era (600,000,000 BC), it was clear that life was taking two paths. One type of life would be mobile and the other would just hunker down and hope for the best - thus was born "animal" and "vegetable" forms of life.

As the internal skeletons became better organized, and means of locomotion began to pay off, they developed protrusions or appendages which helped propel them and steer their way through the water. This was a decided advantage in terms of the ability to obtain food and the ability to avoid becoming food.

These creatures, of course, depended totally upon the water for survival. If one of these primitive creatures became stranded in a tidal pool that was drying up, it was doomed for several reasons. First, it couldn't breath air and second, it couldn't support it's own weight without the buoyancy of water. Third, it couldn't find food. And fourth, it would die of dehydration. There seemed to be no way out of this predicament. Probably the ROFs will turn out to be fish. This is bad, because Dub doesn't even want to eat a fish, let alone - be one. So more work needs to be done.

By about 430 million years ago, the atmosphere was about 7% oxygen (compared to 20% now) but there were no creatures that could breath air. The earth had reached about 90% of it's present age and a vast array of invertebrates and vertebrates had evolved in the oceans, but the land was totally lifeless.

Plants were the first to come ashore. This is not surprising, since they had already developed the ability to plant their roots in shallow water and grow upward toward the sunlight. Edging out of the water should be no problem.

The first animal life to emerge onto the land were probably millipedes, about 400 million years ago, but they didn't lead to ROFs (I don't think) so I won't go into that.

The fish like creatures (our ancestors) had a tougher time of it. About 30 million years after the plants came ashore, the first vertebrate forms were finally able to follow. It isn't clear why they went to the trouble. After all, they had lived in the oceans for several hundred million years. Probably there were a number of reasons.

One theory is that the moon played a vital role in the emergence of animal life onto the land. Since the moon causes the tides to rise and fall, there are tidal pools which are alternately wet then dry. Fish trapped in these pools as the tide recedes would have a distinct survival benefit by being able to slither across a narrow sand bar or other barrier in order to return to the ocean. As they developed better locomotion and an ability to breath air (similar to the lung fish of today), they would continuously improve their ability to escape the traps of tidal pools and live to propagate. So we are descended from the better slitherers, the ones whose fins could also serve as rudimentary legs to push themselves forward. The others stayed in the ocean.

Does this mean that a planet without a moon is less likely to evolve land animals? Maybe so. If true, it would certainly reduce the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets. If the moon was formed by a collision, as described earlier, it would be quite a rare fluke. Similar moons of other planets would likely be extremely rare. If we could really analyze this question, it would tell us something about the frequency of intelligent life in the universe. (Of course, small moons are common, but large moons capable of causing significant tides on the parent body may be extremely rare.) Of course temporary pools could be formed by other events, such as storms, and the lunar tidal pool theory is only a theory.

Other survival benefits would exist for creatures with some ability to survive brief excursions ashore. Escape from predators or a quest for food are two examples. For whatever reasons, amphibians did evolve.

From the amphibians came reptiles and very soon thereafter, the mammals branched off. ("Soon" meaning only a few tens of millions of years.) The reptiles had a head start in gaining mobility, size and predatory skills, however. This created quite a problem for the early mammals. This problem lasted for about 365 million years. During this period, the reptiles grew in number, size and variety, culminating in the huge and ferocious dinosaurs that are the stars of computer generated movies today. The mammals were limited to mostly a life underground or under the leaves or in the treetops, resulting in severe limitations in size.

Here we are, hung up again. The dinosaurs rule the earth and our ancestors appear to be limited to existence as small, mole like creatures, living underground or lemur like creatures living in the upper branches of the trees. What a fate! Why didn't the dinosaurs develop large brains and invent digital computers? Perhaps there are places in the universe where that happened. Here, things took a different turn. Why didn't you turn out to be a dinosaur? Perhaps that would have been our fate. But then something totally unpredictable happens. You probably already know what it is.

Our ancestors, resembling shrews or mice or moles or squirrels or lemurs were living in tunnels and the tops of trees, unable to spend time on the ground without becoming a snack for one of the many fierce and large dinosaurs of the time. These strange monsters certainly ruled the earth. Huge herds wandered the plains like the buffalo before the 1870s. Some even lived in the arctic - suggesting that there were periods of global warming even back then, and without automobiles to blame.

Then, 65 million years ago, a surprising event occurred. A 100 cubic mile chunk of rock fell out of the sky at 30,000 miles per hour. This six mile wide asteroid hit the earth on what is now the northern edge of the Yucatan peninsula. The energy released was equivalent to about 100 million megatons of TNT.

This blast effect was like 100 million hydrogen bombs going off about 30 miles underground. It propelled superheated gas and liquid and solid debris onto ballistic paths in all directions. Some of it escaped into space, but much of it rained down over the entire surface of the earth, starting fires in virtually every patch of woods or forest on earth. Shock waves traveled through the earth's crust, triggering volcanic activity and earthquakes over vast areas. The resulting cloud of dust and smoke surrounded the earth, blocking the sunlight from reaching the surface, producing the blackness of night on the ground. The dust thrown into the stratosphere lost heat through black body radiation into space, cooling the atmosphere to below freezing over most of the earth's surface. The lack of sunlight at the surface caused the death of about 90% of the animal and vegetable life on earth. A tidal wave was sent across the Gulf of Mexico that traveled several hundred miles up the Mississippi valley. It receded, then sloshed back up the valley again. Traces of this flood can be found today.

At least twelve other extinctions are known to have taken place before this time and at least one afterward, but the extinction at the "KT boundary" that exterminated the dinosaurs was the most dramatic and had the most far reaching consequences for life on earth. Had it not occurred, you would surely not be here, or if you were, you would have a furry tail and be living in a burrow. There would be no ROFs sending E-Mail.

When you see Jupiter in the sky, you should grateful for that big old planet. Because of its large mass, Jupiter affects the paths of everything in the solar system. Without its gravitational effects, the asteroid would have missed the earth, and dinosaurs would still dominate the earth today. Also, the strong gravity of Jupiter has acted as a giant vacuum sweeper, scooping up many other such asteroids and preventing a steady stream of collisions that would have made evolution an iffy thing.

Our ancestors probably survived because they were warm blooded and could survive the cold and because they could live on roots and plant debris, while the herbivorous dinosaurs starved due to the lack of vegetation and the carnivorous dinosaurs starved because their prey had died off. (Other relics of the dinosaur era still survive. The crocodiles and alligators and some turtles are essentially unchanged from those of the Jurassic period.)

As the "asteroid winter" receded, life on earth faced a totally new situation. All of the old competitions were gone and evolution was free to find new and different paths. Large mammalian predators evolved to harass our ancestors, forcing them to rely largely on life among the branches.

Another 58 million years passed, during which the small rodent like creatures evolved into a wide array of primates, some of which became ape like creatures about the size of today's chimpanzees. About 5 million years ago, the common ancestors of humans and apes was a creature called "proconsul". It lived in the trees and mainly ate fruits and nuts and had a brain only slightly smaller than today's chimps. It was a pretty stable situation and there was little need for adaptation to create new abilities, such as the ability to live on the ground, walk efficiently and develop a large brain.

Then the family tree branched and our ancestors parted ways with the other primates. This has been measured accurately, due to the fact that DNA modifications occur at a known and predictable rate. Today, our nearest relative is the Bonobo, a variety of Chimpanzee with straighter limbs and higher intelligence than most chimps. About 97% of your DNA sequences are identical to those of the Chimpanzees. (Surprisingly, the percentage is the same for all of us. It is not any higher for flight mechanikers, in spite of what you might expect.)

This genetic branching was probably due to the formation of the great rift valley in Eastern Africa and the resultant rise of the Mitumba mountains, west of Lake Tanganyika. By five million years ago, these mountains had formed a barrier, physically separating our ancestors from the other branches of the genetic tree and had also begun to change the climate of the lands to the east. The resulting savannas presented our forebears with new problems of survival that were quite different from the dense forests they had lived in for so many millions of years. The more arid climate caused the trees to thin out, resulting in locally forested areas, separated by grasslands. This new situation required some adaptation in order to survive. If the Mitumba mountains had not risen, would we be here? Probably not. You would be sitting on a limb, somewhere in an African jungle, making ridiculous howls like a modern rock singer.

Several adaptations were required to cope with the breakup of the forests and the conversion to grasslands. For example, apes move very inefficiently on the ground, using a means of locomotion called "brachiation", a hangover from moving along tree limbs. It is a series of sideways jumps that consume a lot of energy, not a good way to cross a grassland occupied by predators. Changing to walking the way we do, required an erect posture and a redesign of the hip and leg bones and joints.

Around three million years ago, our ancestors living in this new environment had essentially moved down from the trees and were living on the ground. They were only about 3 1/2 feet tall, but walked erect. You have heard of "Lucy", an early australopithecine, discovered by Mary Leakey. Lucy had a brain about the same size as a modern ape, but was distinctly bipedal. The important message learned from Lucy was that we first stood erect, then developed the large brain, instead of the other way around.

Also, there were other advantages to standing upright One could see further, in order to detect predators. Standing erect makes one look larger, which might have discouraged some types of predators, and it would make it easier to carry things, and possibly most important of all, it became possible to manipulate objects with the hands and throw objects, such as stones or spears at threatening predators. In the early days, the throwing of stones may have been one of the better defenses against attacks by predators. Archeological evidence does seem to show that early campsites were more often in areas where stones were abundant. A band of pre-humans, shouting and throwing stones could well cause even a lion to back off. This may explain why the human is the only creature capable of throwing objects accurately and at high speeds. (As an aside, there is a film, apparently taken in the 20s, of a band of Africans chasing down a lion and killing it with spears. I was startled at how quickly they dispatched the lion. It was no contest.)

Lucy had long fingers and toes and could still climb trees, but not very well. She could also amble across the ground, but not very well. She was in the transitional process of changing from a tree dweller to a ground dweller. But, the brains of the australopithecines were to remain essentially unchanged for about a million years.

How could this change to a ground dweller have happened? There were three extremely dangerous animals that enjoyed feasting on our ancestors, the lions, leopards and hyenas. How could these relatively defenseless, primates survive? Certainly many of them didn't. They weren't fleet footed like an antelope and didn't have sharp horns like a wildebeest and weren't huge like elephants. Why didn't we become extinct, like millions of other life forms have?

So there we were. Small, fragile creatures with few defenses, not very fast, not armed with horns or hooves or a trunk that could bash a lion against a tree, but forced to live on the ground among the lions, leopards and hyenas. How could we have survived? The answer is not clear. You can buy a book for a little over $100 called "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution" and it will not tell you. Science cannot provide a clear answer. Speculation has been used by quite a few authors to justify books which claim to provide answers, but the authors are usually not scientists. One author even claims that we became sea creatures again for a while. Another claims that we evolved because the straits of Panama rose above sea level, blocking off a connection between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, causing climatic change. So this is an area where scientific evidence is not strong and the field is dominated by speculation and guesswork and hopefully some correct logic.

There are actually two questions for which science does not provide clear answers. How did we survive being cut off from the dense jungles and forced to live on the ground with lions, leopards and hyenas and how did this lead to a brain that can compose symphonies, split the atom, build digital computers and solve differential equations? All I can offer is a best guess, based upon having read many opinions and giving it some thought, for better or for worse.

You might say, "Well, it's simple. We just got smart, because smart creatures are more likely to survive than stupid creatures."

But, that brings us up against one of the real puzzlers. How did we develop larger brains when there are several reasons not to? A large brain has several DISadvantages.

(1) The brain is fragile and requires the protection of a heavy skull so it's weight and the weight of the skull are disadvantages in the wild.

(2) It consumes a lot of energy. About 20% of the energy you burn at rest is used to power the brain. (Yes, this is believed to be true of flight mechanikers too.)

(3) A larger brain has trouble passing through the birth canal of the mother's pelvis.

(4) A larger brain takes a long time to develop, even after birth, so the offspring takes a long time to become self sufficient.

The above disadvantages probably explain why smart creatures are rare. A cow doesn't develop a high intelligence because it would do the cow very little good and it would have to eat more grass. So how did our ancestors overcome the disadvantages of a brain that was increasing in size? How could the slowly evolving advantages of larger and more capable brains overcome the problems that a large brain brings with it?

Our ancestors had still another unique problem in developing a large brain. The long time it takes a child to become functional means that it must often be physically carried by the mother, making it almost impossible to flee up a tree in a time of danger. Did you ever try to climb a tree while holding a baby? A prowling lion or pack of hyenas must have been a nightmare for our ancestral mothers. "Leave kid, get up tree!" may have been the first spoken sentence. And that is probably exactly what happened countless times. Followed by, "Sorry about that, kid!"

Our extinction on the African savanna would seem to be almost a certainty. What happened? It may have been something like the following:

Have you ever wondered why lions never attack gorillas? The answer is simple. They don't live in the same place. Lions roam the savannas and gorillas live in deep jungle.

The jungles east of the Mitumba mountains didn't change from dense to sparse overnight. This took millions of years as the mountains gradually rose higher and higher. So for a very long period, our ancestors had the ability to live primarily in the jungle, but as time went by, the grasslands dividing one patch of jungle from another became wider. There would be a period when the ability to move across open ground would be a survival advantage, while at the same time, survival on the ground in the jungle, like the gorillas of today, would not be impossible. During this time, we could change from knuckle walkers to standing erect. The erect posture would have the advantages mentioned earlier, when it became necessary to cross the grasslands.

The movements across grasslands could become advantageous from the standpoint of survival because of droughts, fires, invasion of given jungle areas by predators, shrinkage of the available area to produce food, competition with others of our own kind, etc.

Primarily, the ability to move across the savannas to other jungle areas would enhance the quest for food, improving the chance for survival. An erect posture and efficient locomotion would both provide survival advantages during these forays.

So, perhaps, the key was not that the pre-humans were forced to live on the savannas before they were ready, and suffer the predations of the large cats and hyenas, but that the change was induced in a very slow way, as the mountains rose, enabling the adaptations to take place over a long period of time and permitting our predecessors to develop means of coping with the predators. Another fluke, that the Mitumba mountains would slowly rise and set up this scenario.

The advantages of becoming bipedal were discussed in the last chapter. But why did we develop brains that are so far superior to any other creature?

Of course, the conventional wisdom is that becoming bipedal made the hands available to fashion and carry tools and weapons and that the advantage of being able to do so was what caused the brain to grow in size and thinking ability. This then permitted the development of even better tools and weapons. There may be truth in these arguments, but it may be that the value of being able to fashion early tools may not be the key factor. It doesn't seem likely that making a better stone ax led to the ability to invent mathematics or divine the laws of physics. Something else was needed. Even stone axes are a fairly recent development and the brain has not expanded significantly since its invention.

It is widely recognized that the development of speech was a factor in enhancing the value of a large brain. Indeed, the ability to speak a complex language does require a large brain and would certainly have a survival benefit, but most animals have some ability to communicate and it doesn't take a lot of brains to say, "Watch out. Lion come." Monkeys can do that, and they can distinguish between "Lion come." and "Eagle come." How did it become valuable to convey far more complex and even abstract ideas?

What I believe to be the answer began to dawn on me several years ago. I'm sure others have come to the same conclusion, but those that publish such opinions are booed soundly by the more prominent members of the archeological community. There are reasons for this. Research into human evolution is a very severely neglected branch of science. It is largely dependent upon donations from sources that need to stay in good graces with the public and is therefore forced to maintain a popular stance and be "politically correct" at all times. As this argument develops, you will see why you don't read about it in the paper.

Before going into the exact reasoning, let me make a couple of observations. The human brain is an "extraordinary" feature. It is so far different from that of any other creature that comparisons are hard to make. Let us ask what other extraordinary features we find in nature, and why they exist. Consider the neck of a giraffe. It is extremely long. Why? Because it enables the giraffe to reach leaves on trees that deer and antelope cannot reach? No. It is far too long for that to be the reason. It surely must be in order for the giraffe to reach leaves that other GIRAFFES cannot reach. In other words, it competes with other members of its own species.

Consider another extraordinary feature found in nature, the height of a sequoia tree. It is not competing with elms and junipers, but with other sequoias for the available sunlight. So it also competes with other members of its own kind. Other examples are not hard to think of, such as the speed of an antelope (the ones that get eaten are slightly slower than the other antelope), the neck of a swan or the antlers of a bull moose. All of the above are cases where a small difference becomes an important difference. The statistical advantage of some trait or feature surely becomes most important when a small difference can make a large difference. Have you ever wondered why man can run fairly fast, but not extremely fast? Not fast enough to avoid a predator, nor to catch prey, but faster than is necessary to lead a nomadic life.

Consider this: If an individual has the ability to run 2% faster than the average, it is very improbable that a situation will occur, where that 2% will be important, unless he is competing with something else that can run at about the same speed. If a solitary pre-human was running from a leopard, the 2% speed advantage would seldom be a life saver, but if he were running from another human trying to jab him with a spear, it would be much more likely to be a survival factor.

You have probably guessed where I am heading. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the most important competitor of man was man. And when does man become a competitor? Primarily when there is a contest for survival. When in the past several million years have contests for survival been important? Almost all the time, in the form of tribal warfare.

So it is very tempting to conclude that the ingredient that put our evolutionary process in high gear has been tribal warfare. I was leaning toward this conclusion when I happened to watch a documentary on the life of an African native named Shaka Zulu. He was an extraordinary individual in several ways. He was utterly ruthless and brutal, but was also highly intelligent and creative. He soon rose to the top of his tribe and gave them the name of "Zulus". He invented new weapons and battle tactics. The Zulus became a scourge, devastating their neighboring tribes and often committing virtual genocide. I say "virtual" because they would capture the more attractive women and bring them home for Shaka Zulu to mate with, a powerful selective process that not only produced better looking Zulus, but smarter ones too. The estimates of the number of children he fathered range from 300 to 1,000. Shaka provides us with a clear example of where the victor passed along his genes and the losers did not. Surely there have been countless other examples in our history, though maybe not quite so graphic.

In the documentary, the Zulus of today acted out some of the battles that had taken place in the last century. There were cases where the defeated tribe, knowing it was doomed, took flight and the "battle" turned into a foot race, with the Zulus running down the members of the defeated tribe and killing them, IF they could catch them. Survival depended directly on fleetness of foot and a small difference in speed made ALL of the difference.

Practically any documentary on primitive tribes of today, show that tribal warfare is an important part of their lives. Surely, this is not something new. It is now known that even a group of Chimps will engage in warfare with another group. (One report is that about 25% of all deaths among adult chimps is due to these battles.) If this has been going on among humans, and I believe it has, since the days of Lucy, it is easy to believe that tribal warfare has created countless situations where the edge in intelligence and physical assets can make a great difference. Virtually every known tribe of American Indians also engaged in almost constant warfare. In a recent ROF quiz, I asked what "Sioux" means. It means "the enemy". The Sioux were a plague to other Indian tribes long before the white man showed up on this continent. The Louis and Clark expedition even found evidence of genicidal wars between Indian tribes. Warfare can be a complicated business and the side with the best thinking ability is sure to have an advantage, everything else being equal - or even when things are unequal. The American Indians were masters at warfare, and they had one tactic that was "smart" rather than "brave". When the odds were against them, they were wise enough to flee, rather than fight.

This theory is not new. It has been dismissed as the "killer ape" theory and rejected because we live in peace with ourselves most of the time. The operative phrase here is "with ourselves". Man has been a social creature since even before parting company with the apes. He has the ability to demonstrate great loyalty to his own country, or tribe, or group, or family, or club, or school, or gang, or political party, or football team or "whatever". At the same time he can inflict horrific damage on members of the "other" country, or tribe, or group, or family, or club, or school, or religion, or gang, or political party, or football team, or race, or whatever.

It seems to boil down to the "us vs. them" conflict. Examples are abundant, from soccer riots to the endless mayhem between two branches of the same religion in Ulster. "We" are good, brave, kind, smart, attractive, etc. while "they" are bad, cowardly, cruel, ignorant, ugly, etc. This justifies tribal conflict in our minds and lends nobility to our causes. Hitler exploited this trait to the hilt, and led the world into it's greatest disaster ever.

Humans are clearly not the only creatures with this mentality. Apes, lions, wolf packs, hyenas - virtually every social creature - seems to demonstrate this characteristic, to varying degrees and virtually every creature, social or not, will fight over his territorial prerogative. One is tempted to conclude that it is an important factor in evolution. One should not be tempted to attach a moral judgment to this trait. It is not "good" or "bad", any more than your liver is "good" or "bad". It is (or was) necessary and is there because it was a part of our creation, whether we like it or not. Without stress there is no evolution and we provided ourselves with a lot of stress and still do.

If this theory (and it is only a theory) teaches us anything, it is not that we should be ashamed or to condemn the "us vs. them" factor. Rather, we should utilize our higher faculties to recognize it, control it, outsmart it, and not let it lead us into making costly mistakes.

But tribal warfare didn't require the ability to write differential equations. Where did that come from? Hang in there for "On to Einstein".

It will be good news to some, I am sure, that we now end the fifteen billion year saga of how we got from a little puddle of Higgs fields to a bunch of ROFs.

By 300,000 years ago, there were several branches to the human tree, including the Neanderthals, Peking man, Java man and probably many others. Around 200,000 years ago, a new type of man emerged from Africa. Every person alive today has descended from this new line. All of the other branches have become extinct. Were they pushed into extinction by the superior abilities of this new and aggressive version of the human race? Probably so. Who were these new people? They were us.

The Neanderthals survived until about 20,000 years ago. For quite a while, there was speculation as to whether our ancestors interbred with them. I believe there is pretty convincing evidence, based on DNA analysis, that they did not - although the facts are still in dispute. OK, so how did tribal warfare equip us to compose symphonies, split the atom, build digital computers and solve differential equations? That's a good question and is pondered by some of the best minds in science today. A group of leading researchers in their respective fields, including a couple of Nobel laureates, were assembled to debate this question a few years ago. The group included the likes of Freeman Dyson and Stephen Jay Gould. Apparently there is no favored theory on why the human brain appears to have been so much more capable than was necessary to cope with the environment in which it evolved. The Nobel prize winners didn't produce a coherent answer but that doesn't keep me from giving it a try. (Talk about hubris!)

For successful warfare, even tribal warfare, rather complex planning and communication are essential to success. This may have been an important factor in the development of speech. Of course, speech is of great benefit in many other ways affecting the likelihood of survival. I am not about to assert that tribal warfare alone was the driver behind human evolution, only that it was an important component because it certainly has a strong impact on human survival and seems to always be around. Note that this doesn't mean that we needed a war every week in order to evolve. Perhaps a war each generation would be enough, and virtually all primitive cultures seem to experience that.

It is now known that speech patterns are consistent throughout the world, even though the words are different where different languages are spoken. The mental processes required to formulate and interpret speech are extremely complex, requiring a vast store of memory and the ability to instantly draw from extensive contextual patterns stored in the brain. It is well known that a fairly large portion of the brain is dedicated to the processing of speech. The billions of intraneural connections required for this processing may also produce the ability to compose symphonies, split the atom, build digital computers and solve differential equations. Perhaps the neural patterns required to generate and interpret speech are the same ones that permit us to visualize the abstract concepts required for mathematics, music and physical reasoning. (Just a guess.) So perhaps the exceptional capacity of the human brain is due to the ability to speak a language, and the development of language was an important factor in the evolution of man.

It has been a hazardous journey. Our sun could have been just a little larger (or smaller), OR the planets could have ended up at different distances, OR the earth could have been too large OR too small OR with too much atmosphere, OR too little OR there could have been maverick major planets, careening through the life zone where we live, making an inhabitable planet impossible, OR the moon might have not resulted from an impact, depriving us of the tidal pools that were likely a factor in our emergence from the oceans, OR the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs and permitted the mammals to emerge may not have hit, OR the Mitumba mountains might not have risen, creating a slow evolution of the dense jungles into the savannas where we partly evolved, OR the battle for survival in the presence of lions, leopards and hyenas might have been lost, OR countless other hazards that we don't know about could have done us in along the way. But, me made it, so far, and that's why you are here.

So that's how you make a ROF, starting with a Higgs field. Any questions?

Next, one more comment on the effects of this study on my estimate of the frequency of occurrence of high intelligence in the universe.

How many brainy creatures are out there? I began this set of studies primarily to try to formulate a better opinion about the frequency of intelligent populations on planets that orbit other stars. Unfortunately, I don't feel that looking into the whole story, from Higgs fields to ROFs has helped much in estimating the number of advanced cultures out there.

It is easy to conclude that life on other worlds is probably abundant. It seems as though, given the slightest possibility to appear, life does appear, and is very robust and adaptive. But it took billions of years to go from Prokaryotes to Einstein. Also, many millions of life forms, all except one, have met a dead end as far as the development of a high intelligence is concerned. So how likely is it that other scientific thinkers have evolved somewhere?

Clearly, our path was littered with barriers and pitfalls and flukes. The probability of another culture following the same path from Higgs fields to their version of ROFs is nil, but I can think of no reason to doubt that there can be many other paths that lead to a high intelligence.

Then why, among the countless life forms that have existed on earth, is there only one with a high intelligence? This would seem to indicate that such occurrences are rare, but that isn't so clear. Note that once the stage was set, our level of intelligence evolved in a very short time, only about one thousandth of the time the earth has been here. (~Five million years vs. ~five billion years.) and less than one percent of the time that life has been here.

The "Drake equation" contains the number of stars in our galaxy and multiplies it by a number of probabilities in order to try to estimate the number of intelligent cultures. The problem is that each of the probabilities is little more than a guess. Recent discoveries of planets orbiting other stars will probably change one of the key terms in the Drake equation, because it appears that many stars have major planets (Jupiter sized or larger) in highly elliptical orbits and pass much closer to the parent star than Mercury. Those conditions would certainly preclude the existence of an earth like planet in the "life zone". (It also threatens to invalidate some aspects of the most popular theories about the formation of the solar system.) Simulations are showing that if the major planets are somewhat larger than those in our solar system, their gravitational interactions cause them to become unstable and chaotic, throwing some planets out of the system entirely and sending others into the highly elliptical orbits.

It is not clear yet whether such erratic systems are common or that they are merely the ones that are easiest to detect because they produce the largest Doppler shifts in the radiation from the parent stars. New discoveries in this area are progressing rapidly.

So I am back where I started. Just guessing. Perhaps that is all we can do - and your guess is as good as mine. My favorite guess is that perhaps one star in ten thousand harbors an intelligent life form. This assumes that one in 100 has a planet that is in the "life zone" and is not too large and not too small and doesn't have too much or too little atmosphere to permit large amounts of water to exist in the liquid state.

Then it assumes that even though life is very robust and probably exists wherever it can exist, there is only one case in 100 where a life form exists which rises to a "high" level of intelligence. Of course, this is just a wild guess. I am assuming that there are 99 planets inhabited with nothing but animal like creatures for each one inhabited with "human" like creatures. In our galaxy of one hundred billion stars, that would produce about ten million intelligent cultures. The average distance between them would be about 200 light years. Of course that doesn't say that the nearest one is 200 light years away, because the distribution would probably be completely random.

If this wild guess is about right (and it probably isn't) then in the universe there would be 10^18 intelligent cultures. (Assuming that there are about 100,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe and 10,000,000 intelligent cultures in each galaxy.)

So you may be extremely rare or very common, depending upon how you look at it.

I think these lines from an old comic strip sum it up best:

Pogo

Well, there you have it. Upon reading it again, I realized that Doyle minimizes the thousands of hours of research he did. Study not so much spent evolving original ideas, but rather selecting between competing ideas, in search of the most reasonable. Some of his simulations were quite sophisticated, and in some cases, things were put on hold until a better computer came available.

Doyle tried to avoid the obvious religious issues that arise in such a dissertation on creation and evolution. Even so, a few of the ROFs complained about the write up on religious grounds. I fail to see why.

If you believe in the literal Genesis, then this area is not open to discussion. Doyle is to be ignored.

On the other hand if you can accept that the biblical scribes, being human, may have floundered a little when documenting such unusual ideas as Higg’s fields and black holes then perhaps this work can fill in a few blanks for you.

Best yet, may it send you on your own quest for the truth.  Good hunting.

John L Pearson