The Build

There was nothing. Not empty space, because there wasn’t any space yet. Not darkness, because there wasn’t any time for darkness to be dark in. Just a point. Smaller than anything you could point to, and holding everything that would ever exist.

You can’t build a universe from existing materials. There aren’t any. You start with nothing and you work from there.

It opened up. Not gently. There’s no gentle way to unpack a universe from a point. The temperature was past any number that would ever be invented. But it expanded. That’s what a point containing everything will do, once you give it room.

And as it expanded, it cooled. Physics is good that way. Expansion costs energy, and energy comes from heat, and heat is the first thing you spend. Within three minutes the basics were in place: hydrogen, mostly, with a little helium and a trace of lithium.

Not much to work with. But hydrogen is a good brick. You can build almost anything out of hydrogen, if you’ve got enough of it and enough patience. Which was the one thing there was plenty of.

The hydrogen clumped. Gravity pulls mass together, and the more mass you pile up, the harder it pulls. After a few hundred million years there was a ball of hydrogen so compressed that the center got hot. Hot enough to fuse. Hot enough for hydrogen atoms to stop being separate atoms and start being helium.

Stars. There were stars.

The first ones were massive. Hundreds of times the mass of the sun, burning hot and fast, fueled by pure hydrogen with nothing heavier to slow the reaction. They burned, and burning hydrogen makes helium, and when a star runs out of hydrogen in its core, the core contracts and the helium fuses into carbon, then oxygen, then, if the star is massive enough, it keeps climbing the periodic table. Neon. Silicon. Sulfur. Iron.

Iron is where it stops. Iron doesn’t fuse. When a massive star fills up with iron, the core collapses and the whole thing flies apart.

Supernova.

The heavy elements only exist inside stars. The carbon for organic chemistry, the oxygen for water, the iron for blood. And the only way to get them out is to blow the stars up. There’s never been a neater way to scatter building materials across light years of space.

The explosions threw enriched gas and dust outward in expanding clouds. The dust cooled and clumped. It collapsed. Formed new clouds. New stars, with better fuel and heavier ash.

And around some of those new stars, the leftover material didn’t ignite. It formed disks, and the disks clumped into solid bodies. Rocky planets with iron cores and silicate mantles. The periodic table, assembled into ground you could stand on.

A spot was chosen. Yellow star, main sequence, nothing special. Third planet out. Right distance for liquid water, close enough for warmth and far enough to stay solid. An atmosphere with oceans and volcanic activity cycling nutrients through the system. The site survey said it was a good location. The site survey was wrong about a lot of things, but not that.

The place was a wreck. No free oxygen. Atmosphere of carbon dioxide and nitrogen and steam. Oceans that would dissolve a nail. Volcanoes everywhere. Not somewhere you’d take a vacation, assuming you had somewhere to vacation from.

But the chemistry was right. Amino acids forming in the warm shallows, catalyzed by mineral surfaces and lightning. Nucleotides assembling and falling apart, assembling and falling apart, until one of them held together long enough to make a copy of itself.

RNA. A few things were tried, but RNA was what worked. It can store information and, under the right conditions, catalyze its own replication. Not perfectly. Which was the whole point. Perfect copies don’t evolve. The trick was errors, variation, and a system that improves itself through blind trial and error, with no plan and no guide.

A warm little pond. The right chemicals. The right temperature. Then it was left alone.

Evolution ran itself after that. Replicating molecules, with variation, in a competitive environment, built complexity without being told to. Natural selection did the engineering. Better than anything I could have designed by hand, frankly.

Single cells, after a billion years or so. Then cells that cooperated. Clusters of cells with specialized functions. Multicellular life. Then the arms race, predators and prey, parasites and hosts, each driving the other to greater complexity. Eyes appeared. Mouths appeared. Nerves that could carry signals faster than chemistry alone. It took a while. Most of the job is waiting, if you want the truth.

Jaws. Lungs. Fins became legs. Legs stood upright. Hands freed themselves from locomotion and started making things.

It wasn’t a straight line. More like a bush, branching and branching, with most branches dying and a few surviving to branch further. There were ice ages and asteroid impacts, and recoveries that took millions of years but happened anyway. Seventy percent of all species wiped out at one point or another. Then recovery. Then new branches.

Evolution doesn’t stop. It can’t stop. As long as there are organisms that copy themselves and compete to survive, the system iterates.

Six million years before the end, on a continent that would later be called Africa, a branch of the great apes started walking upright. Freed the hands. The hands started making tools. The braincase expanded to handle the demands of tool use and social life.

They spoke to each other. Not just calls and grunts, but words, structured and shared, with meanings everyone agreed on. The ability to talk about things that weren’t there. The ability to imagine things that hadn’t happened yet.

A generation could learn what the previous generation knew and add to it. No other species on the planet could do that. Every other species ran on instinct, the same program for millions of years. These creatures ran on culture. Culture compounds. It was the only force on the job that never stopped.

They built shelters, then cities. They wrote things down, which meant knowledge no longer died with the knower. They domesticated plants and animals. They invented mathematics, the language the universe was written in.

They looked up at the stars and asked where they came from.

They pointed telescopes at the sky and saw galaxies beyond counting. They measured the speed at which everything was moving apart and traced the expansion backward, and found it led to a single point. They detected the afterglow, a faint hum of radiation from every direction, the echo of the first three minutes. They were looking at the beginning and calling it the cosmic microwave background.

They split the atom and found it was mostly empty space. They decoded the genome and found instructions for building a human being written in an alphabet of four letters. Then they built machines that could calculate faster than any brain and used them to simulate the first few seconds of existence.

They asked the big questions. Where did all this come from? Why is there something rather than nothing?

I let them ask.

All those billions of years, for this. The cooling and the burning, the chemistry, the trial and error. All so a rocky little planet around an ordinary star could have the ingredients for blood and bone, and a brain that wonders why it exists.

Not bad for a first try. I’d have made the oceans a little less eager to dissolve things.