Twice upon a time there were two Bangs – a Big Bang and a Little Bang. These two bangs are how we got to here. Without them we really wouldn’t exist at all.
To be a bit more precise the Big Bang happened around 13.8 billion years ago. The Little Bang was only just 65 million years ago.
As you may know, it was the Big Bang that got the world up and going. From nothing at all the Big Bang set off an astronomical, cascading and expanding array of mighty consequences that has led to the world, the whole universe, as we see it today. Stars and their planets. Galaxies and their stars. And the Big Bang’s awesome creativity is all still going on and on and on into the many possible futures.
We, of course, are very interested in our own planet, Earth, in our own star system, the Sun, and in our own Milky Way galaxy. Things started happening on Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.
Things, tiny living things, began to survive and to grow and to replicate. They made copies of themselves and through trial and error they began to fit in to their local environment. Of course, as the environment kept changing so they had to keep adapting to their new homes. This led to an evolving display of life across the Earth. Everything from slime and insects to moss and great trees. From octopuses to dinosaurs and all the great crowds of evolving examples of life on Earth.
The important thing to remember is that this all takes time. Quite a lot of time. For example, to get from tiny little cells of life, like amoebas, to the great thundering tyrannosaurus dinosaurs; that all took over 4 billion years! Sometimes it’s hard for us to get our head around billions of years of long evolutionary time because our brain lives in a much shorter time span of 80 or so years.
And then there was the Little Bang. It was only little when you compare it to the universal Big Bang but, to life on Earth, it was a colossal, if unusual, event. A space rock, a meteor, banged into our planet and wiped out half of all the life on Earth. When I say ‘our planet’ it really wasn’t our planet 65 million years ago. We, us humans, weren’t even here. At that time, the Earth belonged more to the dinosaurs.
However, the great dinosaurs that roamed the Earth, didn’t survive the Little Bang and they became extinct. And that’s where we came in. Actually, it’s where mammals came in, our own ancestors, and the mammals filled the space left by the dinosaurs. The mammals survived and grew and reproduced and adapted into many varieties around the Earth. There came sea mammals like whales and dolphins. And land mammals like elephants and bats. And around 300,000 years ago there came humans. Our own species. We evolved unusually large brains and an ability to walk on two legs and today we are the most abundant species of primate mammals on what we now call ‘our planet’.
As human mammals, with such great brains, we like to understand things. We read and think and explore fossils and do science experiments in big particle colliders and write up reports and discuss them in our meetings and conferences. So, it’s no surprise that we ask questions like: how did all this happen? Big Bangs and Little Bangs and brains as big as your head!
How did the Big Bang happen 13.8 billion years ago? How did the Little Bang happen 65 million years ago?
Today there are two main types of theories, two sets of possible explanations. One theory is that “it just happened” or “it did it itself”. The other theory is that “a Creator did it” or “a God did it”. Of the 8 billion humans on planet Earth today, there are billions who think “it did it itself” and billions who think that “God did it”.
Scientists and professors and thinkers and writers are the kind of people that may devote their career to exploring, discussing and writing about these questions. This little bedtime story is just one of them. They also use great telescopes, some built on Earth and some sent way into space, to explore and measure evidence to support the different theories of the Big Bang and the Little Bang.
Thinkers ask questions like: if it did it itself then what kind of explanation could there be for a universe to self-create? Other thinkers ask questions like: if a creator did it then what kind of God would or could do such a thing? They ask lots of other questions, too.
So, what do you think?
Pope Luciani School of Catholic Science Thinking 