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- 2031 - This is your universe as much as it is anyone else’s. This Review will tell you what you are really made of. How old you really are. And, where your atoms really came from. It all started with empty space and grew from there. It extends out to as far as we can see, our Observable Universe.
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------------------------------- 2031 - The Observable Universe
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- A long time ago the atoms in your body were spread across trillions of miles of empty space. Although space is not really empty. We just call it empty. Billions of years later those same atoms collected together to become your eyes, your skin, your hair, your bones and the 86,,000,000,000 neurons that make up your brain.
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- Most of those atoms were forged inside several different stars that were separated by many trillions of miles. These stars exploded as supernovae and spread themselves outward in a hot gas. These same atoms later came together to form the galaxies throughout “empty space”.
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- Later on the planets and moons around these new stars were homes to atoms that became trilobites, plant roots, wings, blood and the bodies of trillions of bacteria. They became the eyes of dinosaurs that looked out across the landscape of early Earth. They were in the yolks of bird eggs, and the exhaled breath of ice age oxen. These same atoms fell as raindrops and snowflakes that covered the caveman and through his lineage later became you. It is a miracle that you are reading this. Read on:
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- Our Observable Universe is only 93,000,000,000 lightyears wide, That is 10^27 meters radius with our Earth at the center. We do not know how big the rest of the universe is because we can never see it. The speed of light limits what is observable to us from what we call the center.
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- All the matter and energy that we observe is only 5% of what is in the universe. The rest is dark matter and dark energy that is an unknown quantity that we do not yet understand. Even in this 5% if you add up all the ordinary matter you get 10^80 particles that we identify as protons , neutrons, and electrons. This does not count the billion times more particles that we call photons in electromagnetic energy.
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- Electrons occupy the atom’s empty space. The protons and neutrons that occupy the center are in a space 100,000 times smaller that the atom‘s total diameter. And, these particles n the nucleus are made up of quarks and gluons that are even smaller particles. The electrons size is 10,000,000 times smaller than the nucleus at the center.
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- Everything we have talked about , 13.85 billion years ago, was squeezed into a space the size of an atom . And, that needs to include the ‘unseen universe” that we don’t know how big it is. But, it all started expanding from that single seed 13.85 billion years ago. This is not all fiction. It is our current understanding of our universe. It is the history of us.
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- This history of us covers a space 62 orders of magnitude, 10^62. Our horizon is limited to the distance light has traveled during the age of the universe. We live in a very narrow slice of this total history. Our mostly water filled multicellular bodies construct meaning through our senses and consciousness and that elusive intelligence used to figure all this out.
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- But, perhaps our biology is not the only way to construct intelligent life. Our small rocky planet is orbiting an ordinary star. One of a trillion, trillion stars in the observable universe. We are a self aware speck of flesh resulting from eons of evolution. There must be other alternatives? And, other results? What do you think?
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- Our bodies are covered with trillions of bacteria and viruses that emerged with their own evolution. All this has emerged from large numbers of duplicated molecular structures. DNA and RNA itself emerges from protons, neutrons, electrons and the electromagnetic force. How does all this happen ? God only knows.
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- It all starts out with the smallest distance in physics, 10^-35 meters. It takes light
10^-44 seconds to travel 10^-35 meters. That is the smallest scale for distance and time. To get to the largest scale the Microwave Background photons that are hitting you now traveled for 13.85 billion years over 10^26 meters to reach you. In between these limits is our Knowable Universe.
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- The most minuscule of 10^-35 meters is called the Planck Scale. Atoms are 10^-10 meters and there are 10^27 of them that make up our bodies. The quarks that make up the atoms are 10^-20 meters. There are 3 quarks in every proton. It takes light 3.3 *10^-24 seconds to travel across a proton. A virus is 10^-7 meters. There are at least 10^31 viruses on the planet. They out number us by far.
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- Us humans are 10^0, or 2, meters. Our day to day experience is between 10^-3 to 10^3 meters. That is 6 orders of magnitude out of the 62 orders of magnitude. A narrow slice at that. Planets range from 10^7 meters, to stars at 10^10 meters, to galaxies at 10^21 meters. Our galaxy contains 200 billion stars. Some galaxies contain trillions of stars. In total there are 10^10 stars. That is a 1 followed by ten zeros.
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- It takes light 10^17 seconds to reach the horizon of the Observable Universe , which is 10^26 meters away from our center. This is our bubble. Any observer in the universe will think they are in the center of the same bubble. It is something we share with the entire universe. Share this with your friends and family. It should make them feel small in the total scheme of things. No worries. It is bigger than you can think.
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----- 707-536-3272 ---------------- Sunday, March 4, 2018 -----
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