Song 0: Your introduction to *THE* Essential Story …

… Everyone wants this story told; and everyone has their version.

This is the “Cover” for our break-out, cross-genre, multi-media interdisciplinary “book.” It’s meant to be far more than just a book, though. The full presentation is ideally a dynamic, evolving thing, prepared afresh with each telling, presented live and in person by one or more well-seasoned ‘wise ones’—Shaman-sages in an updated modernization of the ancient story-telling tradition that long preceded human written language.

The content of our Song of Everything defies categorization into any specific genre, though the greater part of it contains three basic elements. It is part instructional (non-fiction), part spiritual guide, and part personal narrative.

The non-fiction element encompasses all that today’s Science has discovered (updated as new discoveries are made), while also exploring deep into the often-neglected and unrecognized clues and hints that the frontiers of current knowledge are pointing to.

Secondly, the Inspirational part taps into the deep wisdom of ancient faith traditions where they still resonate with the truths that the universe is revealing.

And lastly the story is partly Aspirational—the speculative expression of one inquisitive mind (your host and author here at Comfortable Universe Headquarters)—not quite fiction, but, rather, following the author’s keen sense of direction as he pursues the available clues down a path toward a broad, coherent, understanding of the Biggest Picture of what our world is all about.

As said, this is a story that is best told in the 80-thousand year+ tradition of oral and visual ‘enactment’ around the hunter-gatherer’s tribal campfire. The participants bring the story to life using language, song, dance, even gymnastics. They’re dressed in elaborate and colorful costumes (with special emphasis on exotic masks). They use props like flaming batons or juggling; and they invite the audience to actively participate. In today’s world there can be video clips and immersive CGI animation. Virtual reality, however, is NOT the aim. This is AI's fail-zone.  This is *real* reality—meant to be an intense, live-in-the-moment, fully interactive physical experience.

Because always, built into the story’s core, is living fire—a riveting personal emotional intensity meant to inspire awe, wonder, raw excitement, sometimes even fear, but with an exquisitely controlled purpose—to engage the audience, capture their imagination, and take them on a fantastical journey into the depths of their own souls.

Here is a form of unceasingly restless, dynamic narrative that evokes the very hearth-fire itself with its vaulting flames, its dangerous crackling chaos, its deep burning core, yet always carefully contained within its ring of stones.

 

Interview with the staunchest, most prominent defender of the Oral Tradition that I know—historian, scholar, and UNESCO executive council member Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1901-1991).

This interview (in French with English subtitles) was recorded in 1969. It was back in about 1960 when, while addressing the United Nations, Bâ first offered his famous quote that the death of the traditional Elder story-teller is equivalent to the burning of a library—an underexploited cultural resource that, if it is not preserved, is lost forever.

* * *

Here begins a fire that cannot be quenched. It is the burning story of the all-pervasive experience we call “life.”

How can a raging fire be captured in words on a page? Not well. What we present here is merely a basic sketch—just a skeletal outline—far from complete fulfillment of the fantastical experience that the caption under the opening image suggests.

Yet even in such a simple static text form, this story is literally “to die for”—it is the essential greatest blockbuster of all time!

How could it not be? The subject matter is the stuff of humanity’s profoundest mysteries—the stuff that keeps more people awake at night than anything else. Yet when it’s revealed in the careful, balanced, natural and comfortable way that it should be, it is the stuff of inspiration—evoking our deepest wonder and awe.

And so, we introduce our Origin Story: the most cross-cultural, most deeply embedded story that humans have ever tried to tell—the story of all of us—our roots, our relationship with everything around us, our purpose, our dreams, and our ultimate destination.

The goal of such a story, when done right, is to satisfy the audience’s needs in balanced, accessible terms—sharing the best available, most reasonable, widest-ranging explanation of what happened to get this thing we call reality started, why we exist at all, what our presence in this universe is all about, how we achieved such a special privilege, and what we could do with this precious gift.

Diverse versions, but with common purpose

We are not all going to agree on the way such a story should be told, of course. Yet most of us would agree that it is a story meant to unify us—to keep our tribe, however we define that, working as one in purpose and vision.

Each and every tribe, and each and every tribal member within said tribe, will ultimately trust only their own unique perspective on this story. Yet there is a vital unifying theme across all cultures—the quest for certainty in an uncertain world—the desire to encircle the raging, chaotic fire with a solid and secure ring of stones—the hope that, when the story is well-told, the members of the tribe will have absorbed the essence of it, and will come away ready to settle down for a comfortable night’s sleep.

Yes, it’s Comfortable! You actually know *much* more than you think you know.

To look at a helpless newborn baby, you may not recognize this unexpected truth:

From our very day of conception, we are endowed with 99.9 percent of the knowledge we need to successfully function in this crazy, chaotic world.

The ‘book of knowledge’ that contains this amazing treasure trove of guidance has been 4.3 billion years in the making!

It’s called our DNA; and here on this blog, we have devoted a post to its essential importance and its largely unrecognized value.

This is our ‘Sense’—our deepest internal intuition—an understanding of each one of the billions to trillions of routine tasks that we do every second of every minute of every hour of our lives—tasks that each and every one of the thirty trillion individual cells in our bodies are busy accomplishing second-by-second, even though we never realized that we needed to know all this shit in order to survive.

But we damn well do.  It didn't happen by accident.

Somebody (usually a single-celled organism living a very, VERY long time ago) had to work out how to choose the right chemical reactions—ones that could work for it—and how to take advantage of every single one of them—how those processes would cooperate and integrate into the collective mission of our thirty-trillion cell human body collective, in order to sustain life and thrive.

Not a single one of these chemical processes can be taken for granted; and yet modern science has identified, categorized, and described only a paltry few of these essential tasks.

Never thought about this before? Few have.

This is where our Comfortable Universe project stands out from all the rest of the Stories that you’ve ever heard.

This kind of ‘outside-the-box’ perspective is just the first taste of the kind of deeply creative thinking that our Song of Everything will be striving to emphasize as we present our version of this essential universal tale.

We’ll give you another quick sample of our craft. It’s a more speculative one, but definitely another thing that everybody seems to take completely for granted *without justification*, because it almost certainly required uncountable trial-and-error attempts to accomplish: the fact that the vast majority of the (ordinary – “baryonic”) matter that our universe generated as it emerged from the inscrutable chaos of the Big Bang turns out to be HIGH OCTANE FUEL, capable of initiating a three-step process that is essential to the successful resolution of the story of us:

• (1) making stars and solar systems,
• (2) while, at the same time, producing all the essential elements for life, and
• (3) providing a reliable mechanism (super-nova explosions) to release these elements back into the general environment where they could gather in chaotic ‘Goldilocks’ habitable zones where the chemical experiments needed to produce life could take place.

Any one of these achievements separately—stars lighting up the primordial sky, the manufacture of 92 complex atomic elements from the primordial fuel of just two abundant elements (Hydrogen and Helium), and the convenient release of these 92 elements back into the general environment when stars self-destruct in just the right way—would have profound consequences to the evolution of the universe. All three of them achieved in a choreographed dance? No way! This is far, FAR beyond any believable claim that it was just a lucky break—a statistical fluke. The laws of physics had to be EXQUISITELY TUNED, through trial and error, we argue, to achieve this crucial configuration.

What to expect as you read on

This post is a rewrite of what we called the ‘Introduction’ in the Song of Everything, Part 1 post.

Presented in the many (currently 30) “Songs” under this title you will find your host’s always-evolving best current working version of this collective Origin Story of ours.

It is intended to be a complete story, starting with how the Universe formed, and ending by making a projection of how humans and life might evolve far into the future.

We’re talking about trillions of years here, at least. Our sun won’t be around. Our universe won’t even be around by then. But we will—a ‘collective we’ in the form of … wait … no spoilers here!

Always our particular version of the “Song of Everything” is working at the frontier of human understanding—trying to piece together the unexplained ‘loose ends’ and missing puzzle pieces that science has exposed. This is a job that few people are doing. There’s a whole lot of big-picture, outside-the-box thinking possible in that realm; but few thinkers work on it because it’s not a pursuit that pays well. In part, that’s because it delves deep into areas where there can be more than one explanation—more than one path that leads to where we find ourselves. The pejorative science term for this is that such theories are “not falsifiable.”

So what?!?

So ... fucking ... WHAT?

Think.  Which path did the putative traveler who witnessed our world-realm’s evolution take to get from point A to point B? What if we don’t even know where ‘point A’ is (which we definitely don't)? Could there be more than one reasonable ‘point A’ that can be shown to be her valid starting point? These questions DO, inherently, have multiple answers. That doesn’t diminish the value of the answers, as science might want to try to have you believe.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME, for Chrissake! We don’t all take the same ones.

But each of us does have to choose a path … if we want to tell a coherent story to ourselves and others. Faced with multiple reasonable stories, we here at Comfortable Universe HQ are choosing a common-sense one that relies on simple steps down one of the more comfortable paths leading from our detailed thought-model that describes the universe’s origin to its present state.

And, for our presentation, the very diversity of possible paths is actually a key part of the story. We’re arguing that there is *inherently* no single possible story—no objective “right” answer to how we came to be, any more than there can be a right answer to why you, the inestimably brilliant current reader of this article, are the person you are rather than finding yourself as a cockroach wallowing in the sewers of Cleveland in 1890.

The Balanced Trinity: Sense, Spirit, Science

Here at Comfortable Universe Headquarters, we take a far wider view of our universe than just the hard facts. Our story, our “Song of Everything,” always strives to maintain a balanced mix of three elements of the dynamic trinity of the ‘ways of understanding’ the world:

1.) Sense: We introduced this above. The deeply ingrained intuitive understanding that we have inherited, augmented by our human physical senses and cultural background, significantly filtered through our life experience. This is the kind of story that an average person who could be your neighbor might tell, and you’d probably mostly agree with it.

2.) Spirit: The element of the story that is distinctive to each individual, vitally dependent on the first-person perspective and its unavoidable uniqueness. Each of us has our personal point of view, and we cultivate it throughout our lives. If we take that job of cultivating our perspective seriously, the result can be a spectacularly rich and far-reaching vision …

Wait ... a vision? ... What the ... ?

Be patient. Let us double-down on this and explain. But first we have to complete our trilogy of components to the story.

3.) The icing on the cake is the newest of man’s tools for understanding the world: the enterprise of Science. The scientist’s gleaned knowledge is meant to be repeatable (that’s where the issue of falsifiability raises its ugly head), and as objective as possible, meaning that it is supposed to be independent of the biases of any individual, any culture, any time in history.

Our four billion years of intuitive understanding, our 80 thousand years of cultural heritage, now have to face the hard, cold scrutiny of experimental testing … where this is possible.

It is not possible, however, in many, many important situations.

The best stories go far beyond what science can tell

Science deliberately limits its scope. If something cannot be observed, then science stands silent.

It is an important feature of nature that we live within a comfortable cocoon of time and space, with tight restrictions on what can be observed. The speed of light restricts our view of the biggest things that surround us, and what’s called the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle strictly limits what we can say about the smallest things.  There are boundaries called the ‘Compton Limit’ and ‘Event Horizons’ that impose further censorship rules (or, in a more positive view, guardrails) that restrict what science can observe and talk about.

Consider the profound and critical questions that are veiled behind these barriers. These include all the early steps describing how our Universe formed and how life got its start. And it includes our visions of where life and the universe might go in the deep future.

Our Song of Everything does not shy away from exploring best answers, or one set of consistent ones, that extend well beyond the boundaries, barriers, and censorship limits that restrict science. This is where the idea of a well-formulated *vision* becomes important.

In modern scientific parlance, it’s called a hypothesis, which distinguishes it from the mysticism associated with, say, the visions that are thickly strewn throughout the Judeo-Christian Bible and most other religious faiths going back to Shamanic traditions.

The seven ‘C’s of a Useful, Practical telling of the Story

What makes a good modern-day “vision”? First and foremost, it has to be a story that others can relate to. It has to Connect with its audience. Vision becomes Visionary—it draws in an audience.

To do so, it faces the task of finding a balance between being Concise yet Complete (not compromising any known facts). The presentation must be Coherent and well-organized. The factual content needs to be verifiable—Citations from public, researchable sources must be included to assure trust and reliability.

And most important of all, coming back to that first “C”, the final product needs to be Comfortable—easy for its intended audience to absorb, while at the same time holding their interest and attention. To that end, it requires Creativity to carry the audience to unexpected exciting and appealing new destinations.

In today’s world, a good ‘vision’ distinguishes itself from the drab, entirely unimaginative AI-generated rehashing of already published information. Real humans re-imagine the best known ‘facts’ in unique and original ways—we build structures (mental models) that even the best AI algorithms entirely lack. Only the quirks of a real human being are capable of pulling off a story with true ‘sparkle’ and ‘zing’. And the best of that comes by telling the tale in person, live, using the full repertoire of gestures, expressions, body language, and intonations.

The Magic and Power of Escaping the Box!

Einstein could be said to have had this kind of vision—viewing the world in a new way that led to his theories of Relativity—Special Relativity in 1905, then General Relativity ten years later.

In ancient times people with such vision were deemed ‘Prophets;’ and the ones that got it right (or the ones that had good PR—Public Relations) are the ones that are remembered.

This old way of talking about the process of developing hypotheses, which are truly nothing but ‘visions,’ has real power.

The stories/theories/hypotheses – the ‘Songs’ that are offered in this series of posts explore ideas beyond the limits of current knowledge, both on the smallest and largest spatial scales and on the distant past and distant future time scales. It’s really an attempt to cover Everything.

That is the Spirit part of the magic ‘trinity’ of a good story; and it is, of course personal to the teller. That’s the part that makes any story robust and complete—the telling, with a speaker and an audience—the part that gives life to words and information—puts it on a living substrate!

Do not be shy. Stand up and tell your story!

Imagine a closed book sitting on a dusty shelf high in the stacks of some forgotten library. What does that book say? Nothing … until somebody takes it off the shelf, dusts it off, and reads it. Suddenly, an inert collection of atoms organized in the form of symbols becomes a ‘vision,’ simply because of a choice to ‘observe’ the atoms made by a person who has had some training in the interpretation of those symbols. Sounds a lot like magic. Or quantum mechanics.

Taking the magic and turning it inside out: that ‘training in the interpretation of those symbols’ exists in another library—the observer’s mind. And that brings us full-circle, back to Amadou Hampâté Bâ.

“In Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns, an entire library disappears, without the need for the flames to destroy the paper.”

In this story, your host aims to use the terms ‘observer’ and ‘mind’ in the broadest sense. We’re going to eventually be talking about a vast Intergalactic Empire run by single celled interstellar space travelers, who we call the Twees. Do single-celled microbes have minds? Stay tuned! That’s the sort of outside-the-box magic that we’ll be revealing ... and reveling in!

Open your books, people! Share them, just as we’ll be doing here! As the prophet Mohammed was told (three times!) by the Archangel Gabriel in his seminal vision in the cave of Hira in 610AD: 

“Iqra!”

“Read!” “Recite!” “Proclaim!”

Imagine if Mohammed had gone back home, told his wife he had just had a bunch of crazy hallucinations, and decided to just keep it all to himself!

The Christian Bible speaks to this as well. Paraphrasing Matthew 5:15-16:

“Does a person light a lamp and then hide it under a bushel basket? Of course not! The lamp is set on its stand, giving light to all the world. Let your light so shine before all men ...”

If we never proclaim our stories, then what value can they possibly have?

Most importantly, there is no better way to clarify your personal take on this greatest of all possible stories than to share it with others. It forces you to organize it, to work out the kinks, to strengthen the narrative. As the old adage goes: “the best way to learn a subject is to teach it to others.” And what more important subject is there than “the meaning of life?”

And so, with that said … off we go!

Strap yourselves in and enjoy the ride.

Song 30: And now we launch into Uncharted Seas

“The Captain and the Rag Doll” – a novel concept in three images.

Here is a scene on the bridge of the “Vantage Point” space station positioned at the range of the Solar Gravitational Lens (547 times the distance between Sun and Earth—75.8 light hours away from Earth).

The Vantage Point’s dual missions are to use the Sun’s Gravitational Lens as a massive natural telescope (it magnifies objects as much as 10,000,000,000 times!) to examine nearby star systems in search of habitable exoplanets, and, secondarily, to use radar to detect interstellar objects passing nearby.  Whenever an interesting object comes near enough, a small probe, and sometimes a manned ‘shuttlecraft’ is deployed to intercept it and return samples.

But there is big trouble aboard the Vantage Point.  The Twees (our Song of Everything's proposed pan-cosmic interstellar single-celled beings, which possess a depth of DNA-based genetic-level 'intelligence' that, despite being ploddingly slow, deliberate, and patient, far exceeds human understanding and capability to cope with, other than by the brute-force application of broad-spectrum antibiotics) arrived in an interstellar sample half a century ago.  Being the exquisitely adaptable life forms that they must be in order to have 'learned' to travel interstellar space and to out-compete and displace the indigenous life on virtually every planet that they encounter, they easily evaded the station’s strict sample isolation protocols.

They seemed innocuous at first, but within a few decades, they had worked their patient magic and had taken effective control of the station. As a result, human replacements were forbidden.  The last arrival and the last onboard births were supposed to have happened thirty-five years ago.  All of the remaining commissioned human crew members on the station are aged 60 and older.  The Captain is a Twee-operative Cyborg with an AI interface implant that can crudely communicate with his single-celled masters from the Twees' Great Pan-Cosmic Interstellar Empire.

In the scene shown, the Vantage Point's Captain has just discovered this little unauthorized ‘stow-away,’ Bel Patrí, illicitly born aboard the station, and an interrogation is under way.  The radiation of space that penetrates the bulk storage holds, where Bel was born and raised (not designed to be occupied by humans), resulted in little Bel being born with 13 fingers (six on the left hand, seven on the right).

Seventeen years later, with the patient Twees having now infiltrated Earth itself, the planet is in chaos.  Depicted here is the defining moment of the Song of Everything’s deliberately optimistic version of the future.  This is obviously a fictional treatment, but it represents the establishment of a Human alliance that we in our real world (or in a related universe) may find vital to our future.  It’s based on our Song of Everything’s serious proposal that there really could be some sort of Pan-Cosmic Empire of the Twees operating in ways that we don’t naturally recognize as intelligence.  But that’s our problem—a far too narrow-minded (quick-witted but unwise) interpretation of ‘intelligence’.

Call it a ‘Peace Treaty’ if you must, because the prime mission of the Twees—really just their natural instinct—is to dominate every planet that they colonize.  99.9 percent of the time, that means destruction of everything that resists or gets in their way, and this provides a frightfully chilling answer to the ‘Fermi Paradox.’ 

Shown here is a scene on an exotic habitable exoplanet orbiting a rogue star that had escaped the galaxy Andromeda and was approaching the Vantage Point space station.  The alien is named ABI (Abby) and the human is none other than our little Rag Doll, Bel Patrí, who has grown up to become the senior ambassador representing all of humanity.  ABI is a Twee-constructed “Artificial Biological Intelligence,” which acts as the representative of this newly arrived Twee culture—part of its “Central Authority.”

What’s under that huge turban that Bel is wearing? “Much and more,” as George R.R. Martin is fond of saying.  (Note the Captain's oversized hat in the first image.  He's wearing it for a reason.)

Lastly, here’s the book cover, with a look at the Vantage Point Space Station itself, taken presumably with a good night-vision camera and with a whole lot of dramatic license, because at the distance of the Solar Gravitational Lens, the light from the sun is only about 1½ times the brightness of the full moon on a clear night here on Earth.

The circular portions of the massive ship contain rings of rotating magnetically constrained habitats, where the rotation creates exactly 1-g earth-equivalent ‘gravity’ through centrifugal force.  The cosmic scene is where some liberties have been taken for dramatic effect.  I doubt if the heliosheath, the ‘cloud’ in the background, produced by the solar wind, would be visible at all.  The sun would be a pinpoint, with no resolvable width to the naked eye.  A potential habitable exoplanet (orbiting another star) that is being viewed as magnified by the gravitational lens would be much, much dimmer, in general, and would be concentrated in a ring so close to the sun’s disc that the naked eye could not see it.  Only the space station’s high-quality telescope with a coronagraph to block the sunlight, and with a long, long exposure time, could resolve the details of that distant object.  But that detail would be astounding.  The telescope can resolve objects 25km across (a modest sized city) on an exoplanet 100 light years away!

For the first 29 songs of this series, we’ve been talking about the past, constrained by what we see—from our deepest origins as a universe to the origins of life. With that story on the table, it is now time to discuss the future.

Song 30 will be focusing specifically on the human story and on our potential as citizens of a vibrant Cosmic ecosystem as outlined in Song 29.

Science’s predictions about the future of our sun, of our solar system, of our galaxy (with its imminent collision with the giant neighboring galaxy Andromeda) and of the deep future of the universe as a whole are well covered in the conventional literature. As always, Wikipedia, scrupulously citing and clearly identifying its source material, is a great starting point. This Link to the “timeline of the far future” page is pretty comprehensive and a super fun read.

Prior to the Comfortable Universe series, we took a stab on this blog at exploring the human future regarding the prospects of our species expanding out into space and even into other universes. The ideas ranged widely and sometimes drifted into the realm of fiction.

Here, our Song of Everything’s story builds on that post.  At the outset, here, we keep a reign on the speculation. Armed with additional time to contemplate (since writing that Utopia or Bust blog post linked in the previous paragraph), we are now offering a new perspective, which is this: Although we may never encounter ‘intelligence’ of a multi-cellular form that we can recognize and ‘talk to,’ maybe we just need to be a bit more humble, adjust our idea of what we mean by intelligence, and consider afresh what a different, far more patient form of intelligence may look like.

This will be a discussion without much embellishment regarding the potential radically profound accomplishments that versatile, hardy, and adaptable single cell organisms might have achieved, and where we could fit into their putative great Pan-Cosmic Intergalactic Empire.

In Song 29, we postulated that early-onset life, appearing within the first 200 million years of the universe’s existence, is nearly certain to exist out there. This is not fiction, but the most reasonable big-picture extrapolation of our available knowledge about the astrophysics and chemistry of the early phases of the universe. Because all the events on the statistical tail of the various distributions in the early universe (of matter, of its clustering into stellar nurseries, and of its metallicity—the concentration of the heavy elements required for life to develop) favor vastly earlier star formation in isolated pockets than the large-scale average picture that the Standard Model of Cosmology describes, logic tells us that life could have been able to establish far earlier than we might expect; and the ongoing discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope of galaxies “too old for the universe” are providing more and more evidence corroborating this picture. In this hot early, highly chaotic regime, during which most of the universe was a laboratory for conducting long-enduring and wide-ranging chemistry experiments, it seems almost inevitable that the first hardy extremophile organisms would emerge and quickly thrive.

We have called them the Twees; and we posit that the peak of their activity (the apex of their ‘Civilization’) happened very long ago, soon after the time when the entire universe, wall-to-wall, was in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ of equitable temperatures in which water was mostly liquid, between 15 and 200 million years after the Big Bang. (By contrast, the universe today is 13.8 billion years old.)

What characteristics might the Twees have evolved that would give them their survival advantage? Simple adaptability to a wide range of environments, and the ability to go into a dormant state for extended periods seem to be among the basics.

Then … the ability for World-hopping would be a revolutionary survival advantage (the term for this is ‘panspermia’) if it can be achieved. Wikipedia has this subject fully covered.

Our Twees, as pioneer interstellar travelers in a universe teeming with other life forms, would then evolve the ability to assimilate and/or displace any competitors on the worlds that they settle on.

This brings up the scary potential answer to the Fermi Paradox discussed in the caption to the opening image. Twees might have overwhelmed and either eliminated intelligent life forms, prevented them from ever developing our form of intelligence in the first place, or perhaps even parasitized them. This latter possibility could, potentially, lead to a symbiosis, which may not be all bad (for us). Perhaps the ‘smartest’ Twees ‘realize’ in their slow, patient genetic-evolutionary way of ‘thinking,’ that partnering with a civilization of super smart, quick thinking, highly structured and organized multi-trillion-cell colonies, might be a very comfy way to live.

Good. Check your gut flora, ladies and gentlemen! There you might find your Intergalactic alien invaders. Or check your mitochondria! Maybe ET is living comfortably deep inside of every one of our cells!

This is not quite fiction, we remind you, because we have a sound scientific hypothesis underlying this. We believe we’ve made a pretty strong case, in Songs 28 and 29, that panspermia is no fringe theory.

But we’re not finished. Now we *will* launch into speculative uncharted seas, and sail well beyond the ragged fringes of serious science. To wit: Is it possible that our Twees could find a way to transition through the mysterious portal/gateway that leads from parent universe into its descendants—the proposed baby universes?

Who first said: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”?  Deeply, deeply profound words.

But what a leap! Perhaps so, but even this, we claim, is not complete fiction. More to come as we elaborate.

We’ve talked at length about the Big-V Vacuum where our universe is a mere dot among a sea of dots, each with internal rules on how to interact with the other dots, all of which they must interact with continually.

Please take serious note of one key word in the last paragraph. Interact. In the lawless Vacuum, Universes *must* deal with (interact with) the other dots, albeit via employing highly controlled pathways as defined by their own internal rules, as we’ve tried to carefully describe in Song 27. And some of those other dots—likely to be the ones our universe most closely interacts with, would be its relatives—ancestors, children, cousins, etc.

We’ve talked about Flat World, which is the composite realm of the multiverse where related dots interact, perhaps in ways that can be formally described.

Flat World.  For a comprehensive tour of all of Flat World from its very edge (see image below) to the bustling civilization encircling the blinding ‘font’ of eternal inflation at its center, please refer to “The Navel of Time,” seventh novel in the “Eden’s Womb” sci-fi series.

At the very brink of Flat World, sheltered from the howling “Death Wind” by the modest home of the ancient and enigmatic being named Eeyock, sits young Azura Timberfell and Eeyock herself.

Science accepts, albeit begrudgingly, that the unobservable multiverse is likely to exist as a consequence of eternal Inflation. Individual universes are bubbles that have first cooled (perhaps by condensing into black holes of every imaginable size) and then ‘re-heated’ (perhaps via Hawking radiation). The emergence of multiple universes from the same inflaton field requires that each individual entity that appears (assuming they exist) has a common ancestor. That already implies at least a one-way interaction between these entities (which we depict as separate individual universes that populate Flat World) and it implies a set of common guiding laws, at least as a starting point.

Beyond that basic family connection, the subject of interaction between universes is such a wide-open area that it is really only possible to imagine examples of how it could happen and their consequences. (Physicists have explored wormholes and bumping universes in string theory as examples.) Beyond that, we can drift into a realm of fiction, maybe ‘science fantasy’ in which the ‘rules of magic’ by which universes talk to one another are intended to be constrained by some sort of physical system that is well beyond our ken, with constructivist-style laws that demand ‘either you must be physically possible and internally consistent or you will degenerate into useless garbage’. But it’s basically impossible to define the limits regarding how such systems could be configured. We’re just too primitive in our thinking. Imagine how a cave man would react to a device that conveys information via radio waves.

Okay. If you are willing to grant, for the purposes of a thought experiment, the idea of a Flat World in which universes can communicate and interact with one another, then we have to throw in the ‘monkey wrench.’

We have to allow the multiverse to play the powerful wild card of simulation scenarios (especially physically instantiated analog models, rather than digital) because it is in the deck.

If our whole Song of Everything story as presented in the preceding 29 songs is correct—in which an egg-within-egg-within-egg genealogy of universes can effectively manifest ‘something from nothing’ via the ‘magic’ of Inflation and by exploiting Higher Order Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis, in which the eggs (the babies) gain complete autonomy without ever actually leaving the womb (“hatching”), with each generation being entirely self-sufficient, self-supporting, and robustly capable of evolving greater complexity than that from which it arose, and lacking any dependence on the ancestor/parent entity or on any external environment at all, except to be left alone sufficiently to function—then this story cannot easily prohibit ‘designer eggs/babies’ with any sort of *purpose-driven* agenda.

Here’s where even the tiniest seed of possibility for interaction between universes can potentially take root (if controllable, or degenerate into a cancerous chaos if not).

Consider: life, when successful, is all about controlling what is otherwise rampant chaos.

If life takes control, then the thought space for purpose-driven universe interaction becomes almost limitless. The possibility of being capable of creating, and then moving into, a child universe with custom-designed characteristics and with effectively unlimited resources (both of which can equal or exceed the parent’s) opens our Song of Everything to stories that just dazzle the imagination. It is life’s ultimate survival strategy.

Tell me, dear conservative and cautious scientist, that this proposed ‘pathway to practical immortality’ is categorically impossible. And please kindly provide your proof.

The Twees, being first to appear here in our universe, being far more abundant than we’ll ever be, and being far more adaptable, hardy, and resilient, would be the first to blaze this trail, and to exploit it, should it lead to the ‘promised land’.

And … *if* the Twees achieved this transcendent feat (obviously a gargantuan *if*) then here, dear reader, is unquestionably the ultimate goal of our human enterprise.

New universes await!

Shall we go on? Shall we sail on toward such exotic, remote, and unexplored horizons?

“GANDALF: The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass; and then you see it.

PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?

GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.”

Song 29: When the Whole Universe was a Garden of Eden …

Artist’s rendition of what a primordial quasar from the universe’s first few hundred million years might have looked like, with sheets and clouds of gas and dust, stars and early star clusters.  Little is known about the details of the astrophysics of this early time, as almost all evidence for it is hidden by these highly chaotic surroundings.  It is amid this chaos that our Song of Everything posits the first life emerged.  Image credit: Adapted from NASA/ESA/ESO/Wolfram Freudling et al. (Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility)

Here’s a Rock-solid FACT about the universe we live in:

At one time in the distant past, calculated to be around 15 million years after the Big Bang, our entire universe was bathed in room temperature radiation, such that water *EVERYWHERE IN SPACE* would be liquid.

That was the time when the flash of light that the Big Bang produced—what is now our Cosmic Microwave Background—was at Room-Temperature. It was a Wall-to-wall Goldilocks zone … where Mama and Papa and Baby Bear’s cozy kitchen was a ‘room’ 850 million light years from wall to wall!

But wait. Here come the killjoys … the cautious, conservative, consensus story that science will tell you (i.e., the ‘canon’ that best explains all the available evidence, and so is assumed to be ‘right’ until there is a better story to tell) is that this Enormous Room was nothing but an empty shell.

They’ll tell you that our little nugget of rock-solid fact about a Cosmic Goldilocks Zone doesn’t mean diddly, because 15 million years after the Big Bang we were in the ‘Cosmic Dark Ages.’ No stars had started to form yet. All that existed back then, according to the Standard Model of Cosmology, was an 850-million-light-year-sized bag of gas—consisting of free-floating molecular hydrogen (75%) and helium (25%) and a tiny trace of Lithium bathed in that room-temperature radiation. No water existed then, their story goes, and so *who cares* if it would have all been liquid.

Sorry to disappoint you, killjoys, but your story just doesn’t stand up to simple common sense, so our Song of Everything is here to tell a better story.

We’ll begin with the ‘standard disclaimer’ that our story is just a ‘Song,’ meaning that it is a proposal or a hypothesis based on a wide-ranging common-sense survey of the full, comprehensive bigger picture of what could be out there in such a vast ‘room’ in that early epoch, even if it might seem to be statistically unlikely, and how the very rare events and out-on-the-edge interactions that are neglected by the Standard Model will end up dominating things. Our resulting ‘Song’ just seems to be the picture that most naturally shakes out or falls into place or connects the known puzzle pieces (things not currently explained), including a constant barrage of new revelations from James Webb Space Telescope of impossibly mature looking very old galaxies.

In Song 28, we noted that life on Earth was already well established just 200 million years after the planet came into its Habitable Zone; and we concluded that ‘Life is Everywhere’ just waiting for our probes to get out there and discover it. Here in Song 29, we double down on that—reaching the conclusion that on Cosmic scales, life is not only everywhere today, but it has been widespread since nearly the beginning of the universe.

To get our story started, we go back to a much earlier time, during that period in which those primordial elements—Hydrogen, Helium, and Lithium—first formed from the agitated soup of early matter called the Quark-Gluon Plasma.

This was the time when matter was first able to form atomic nuclei, and ultimately atoms. The process is called Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), and the epoch when this happened was super early relative to the 15-million-year Goldilocks era. BBN ended when the universe was just 20 minutes old, yet even then our observable universe was 300 light years in radius—already an absolutely gargantuan space for tiny, rare details to make a huge, huge difference.

What kind of tiny details are we talking about? There are two. One is pretty much rock solid. High precision BBN calculations show that it produced more than just Hydrogen, Helium, and Lithium. There was also a tiny but significant concentration of the heavier elements (like Carbon, Oxygen and Nitrogen), which were large enough, according to the calculations, to affect the formation and evolution of the first stars. The other is the subject left hanging at the end of the level-headed video from PBS Spacetime above—the question of how gigantic quasars could have formed so early. This is the subject of a great deal of scientific interest, and the leading candidate for an answer is a subject that is still barely understood—Primordial Black Holes.

But first, back to the high-precision BBN calculations. The radiation bathing that universe during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis was at a Temperature of 10⁹ to 10⁷ degrees K. This is EXACTLY the same temperature at which hydrogen fusion begins (10⁷ K), Helium Fusion (10⁸ K) and fusion of heavier elements (10⁹ K). The (mostly iron) core of supernovae reach 10¹¹ K when they’re ready to explode. How could this NOT be related to BBN—it can’t be a coincidence. The obvious problem is that this moment in our ‘look-back,’ during which BBN happened, appears to be only a few minutes long (about 20) before the universe cooled and the fusion reactions were stopped, whereas Stellar Nucleosynthesis models show that it takes millions of years at that temperature to build up appreciable amounts of the heavy elements via fusion.

But ***Here’s where the minute details matter.*** The image below is a screen capture of a small part of a recent paper on the high-precision BBN calculations, where the authors discuss the influence of the heavier elements (which they collectively call “CNO”) on the formation of the first stars (called Population III stars):

Second, if there were Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) back then (even just a very random few), then there could also have been dynamic chaos, such as the relativistic jets emitted from rotating, heavily feeding black holes, from explosive decay of the tiniest black holes evaporating by Hawking Radiation, and from matter being whipped around the deep gravitational wells near and between black holes—all of these chaotic motions can also approach relativistic speeds.

Our Song of Everything points out that the 20-minute ‘look-back’ time is calculated from our ‘stationary’ perspective. Because of time dilation, the relativistic matter in this early chaos will reside in this Goldilocks energy regime far longer than 20 minutes by its internal clock. At the same time, other aspects of the chaos would be generating additional heat to keep the Nucleosynthesis porridge stirring at just the right temperature for much longer. These include density waves from gas cloud collisions, dynamic flows such as the spiral bands in galaxies, and all manner of angry storms and turbulence within this primordial gas … and …

… and almost certainly the formation of some very early stars far sooner than the Standard Model admits.

Even without any Primordial Black Holes, there had to be turbulent flow emerging from the decay of inflation because of the quantum fluctuations—not just the ones that are claimed to exist when inflation began, which are said to have expanded with it into the structure that formed galaxies and galaxy clusters, but those that spontaneously formed during and at the end of the epoch of inflation, making that end an uneven, ragged ‘edge’. These fluctuations would all be smaller in scale, and they are the subject of a recent discussion on Primordial Black Holes that we’re including here for those who want a full immersion at the frontier of today’s research.

This video pretty well covers the state of the art in Primordial Black Hole news. (Wikipedia offers a wider perspective and a pretty comprehensive history of the subject.) At the beginning of the video, the host, Fraser Cain, makes a humble disclaimer that sometimes he was struggling to grasp the ideas that his guest, 29-year-old Indonesian Post-Doc Physicist Jason Kristiano, was discussing. But in reality, Fraser managed to corral and summarize quite accurately the gist of the subject matter. He made only one small error that I noticed—an error that is easy to make. He assumed that Galaxies and Galaxy Clusters formed from the warm temperature anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background, when, in fact, it is the cold patches that gave birth to the galaxies because the extra gravitational pull of the denser clumps of matter put a greater drag on the light attempting to escape it, so its wavelength is stretched more.

Fraser kept a lot of the focus on the possibility that Primordial Black Holes could be a candidate for Dark Matter while the guest asserted a commonly held view that PBHs could just be a small part of it. Importantly, there is no evidence for surviving primordial black holes at all, so they’re either very rare or were all very small and have already all evaporated.

No matter. Our Song of Everything’s interest in this discussion is not on today’s quest to explain Dark Matter, but on the very early period before any but the tiniest of black holes would have evaporated, and on the effect that the high-amplitude quantum fluctuations that Jason was talking about would have on the surrounding matter.

Even if these fluctuations that appeared during the period of inflation (or most of them) did not reach amplitudes to produce significant numbers of PBHs, they would still have a significant impact on the post-inflation environment.

As a reminder, the Standard Model of Cosmology is fully dependent on the blanket assumption that Inflation smoothed the Universe at all scales so that it can be assumed to be homogeneous and isotropic.  This is unquestionably the right assumption at the largest scales—for the universe as a whole.  But it loses relevance at the smaller scales (anything smaller than clusters of galaxies). Nevertheless, even with this broad-brush simplification, the Standard Model *still* allows the first stars to form within 50 to 200 million years after the Big Bang. Our Song of Everything is just demonstrating that all the important galaxy-scale anomalies in the tail of the statistical distribution will start stars earlier, never later. We therefore argue that it should be possible and relatively simple to build a bridge on solid piers of additional local star forming zones that might be statistically uncommon but would nevertheless become highly likely across the vast expanses of the cosmos during those ‘Dark Ages’ between the Goldilocks zone at 15 million years, and the Standard Model’s onset of Star Formation.

The picture seems pretty natural and comfortable and common sense, doesn’t it?

Turbulence, shock waves, random flow, and general chaos on star-forming scales seems just about unavoidable and readily stirs the porridge pot; and all this smaller-scale stuff is not adequately represented in the story told by the Standard Model.

Here’s another image, not an artist’s rendition, but a NASA Image from Hubble Space Telescope of a young star forming in a stellar nursery of gas and dust in the Orion Nebula—an object called Herbig-Haro Object 24.

It is exactly those sorts of chaotic environments of molecular (not ionized) gas and clouds of dust and miscellaneous heavy elements that are the stellar nurseries in today’s galaxies and were just about ubiquitous in the early universe!

The flow of all of the discussion above points to a far earlier start to the formation of the first stars. There seems a real possibility, and even a likelihood, that in isolated pockets, stars could, indeed, have begun forming during the Goldilocks CMB period 15 million years after the Big Bang.

Population III stars—these first stars—burn through their nearly pure hydrogen-helium fuel much faster than later stars. Many of them would have gone super-nova in just 2 to 5 million years, releasing great chaotic clouds of the precious heavy elements necessary for life to form.

In the chaos, free oxygen molecules from the stellar explosions (and the few that were formed during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis way back as early as 20 minutes after the Big Bang) would get together with the ubiquitous hydrogen, and water would quickly form. Our argument is that in the statistical tail of the density spectrum of matter during these early times, there could feasibly have already been concentrations of water and the other constituents needed to for life as soon as 15 million years after the big bang.

These ‘small pockets’ with life-forming heavy elements would by no means be small in comparison to individual stars. The evidence for very metal-rich, very young galaxies that is being gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope points to the fact that such ‘small pockets’ could easily be the size of whole galaxies driven by actively feeding super-massive quasars and would contain all the chaos of galaxy-scale Starburst gas clouds. This is exactly the scene depicted in the opening image.

NOW – in Song 28, we thoroughly explored the topic of how quickly life appeared after planet Earth entered its ‘Goldilocks zone’. Here, we extend that argument to these early epochs where far, far more of the universe’s matter existed in Goldilocks zones that could have been as large as whole starburst dust and gas clouds, and perhaps whole galaxies.

We argue that the simple single-celled extremophile life-forms that are known to have gotten a quick start here on earth, would have done the same in countless rocky rogue planets and stellar primordial protoplanetary discs way back then, when the habitable zone was everywhere. Life’s greatest dominance would have been in these early chaotic environments that stretched far and wide across that Enormous Room 850 million light years from wall to wall.

The more rocks that get banged together, bringing with them the raw materials for developing and sustaining life (‘food’ and energy), the better it is for these rugged, hardy microbes.

Life would soon be everywhere. In a timeframe that is remarkably similar to the time it took for life to establish here on Earth (the first 200 million years), it seems highly plausible that life would have proliferated across ALL of our Universe.

All in the first 200 million years after the Big Bang.

And then ... maybe it has been all downhill since. This is a remarkable and surprising perspective. It is arguable that we humans live in the universe’s twilight years—in an era of slow, steady decline in life’s abundance. The era of dominance of the Pan-Cosmic Intergalactic Empire of the Single-cell Microbes (who we have called the “Twees”) may have come and gone long-long ago.

As our universe cools, the Goldilocks zones are shrinking and concentrating and becoming increasingly isolated from one another. Life finds itself huddling closer and closer to individual stars or retreating deep into the still-hot cores of planets.

From the point of view of those robust extremophile microbes, our universe today would seem positively deserted, inhospitable, and hopelessly geriatric!

Yet here we are, clinging on, thanks to the ever-adaptable single-celled beings, who have learned to cooperate to form cognizant, symbolic-reasoning, technological operatives to do their bidding.  Yes, we are those operatives—nothing but advanced colonies of 30-trillion specialized single cells!  Yet, what a marvelous construction we are!  Our quick-thinking brains blink on and we look around. Wow! Here we sit in one of the universe’s dwindling goldilocks zones, entirely comfortable, relaxing on our couches!

So … what role is left for us in this positively ancient, dying universe?

The possibilities are nearly unlimited! We named a few of them way back at the end of Song 21 (see the very end of that long post).

To be sure, we have to take care of our own house first. The universe may already be ancient from the perspective of the Twees, but the future remains vast, and our role in it obviously requires us to not kill ourselves off.

Our immediate role, then—the thing we can do right now and are already doing—is to be the documenter of the workings of this astounding universe. With our symbolic-reasoning minds and the disciplines that the natural sciences have steered us toward, we have established a beachhead of useful descriptive understanding of how a lot of things work.

Our purposes in this regard are three: to continue to discover more, to establish as permanent a record as we can of what we have learned, and to disseminate this record to the “Universe at Large”—by which we mean a place and a time and a way of being that we may not even be able to recognize or comprehend (yet), but which is out there in the realm of nearly unlimited possibility for the future.

Our Comfortable Universe’s Song of Everything now launches into that realm. Again, back in Song 21, we broached the subject with the introduction of Flat World. In other contexts, we have contemplated the Twees and how we humans may partner with them. We’ve talked extensively about Universes having Babies. We have contemplated how Humans might become active participants in Universe Self-Replication, potentially finding ways to transcend our present universe, either physically, or by transmitting the knowledge we’ve gathered, or even a hybrid of the two!

It’s mostly fun at this point, but we always attempt to remain rooted in and constrained by what is physically possible.

And that is why we will always come back to our advocacy for a comprehensive cosmic search and discovery mission. If some other species somewhere in a past universe or in a far-away galaxy, has preceded us in assuming the role of documenters of the nature of our shared existence, then maybe their messages are out there to be found. Perhaps they’re embedded deep in those interstellar rocks that come to visit. Maybe they’re coded in some structure that our universe has inherited, perhaps even in something as abstract as a Quantum Wave Function. (Is it possible to ‘invent’ a new quantum field and manufacture it in a lab? Have we already done something like that with meta-materials?!)

We will never be done exploring; and you are all invited to come along for the ride.

Song 28: The Hidden Intergalactic Empire

 It’s all around us.  Here’s how to make contact.

Low-tech Intergalactic space-ships from small rocks to comets to whole intact solar systems are being flung out into intergalactic space all the time.  There are a trillion estimated “rogue stars” (free-flying stars that have escaped their home galaxy) in the Virgo Cluster alone!  What passengers might these space-faring missiles be carrying with them?  Image, courtesy of NASA, is a Hubble Space Telescope view of ‘The Mice’ galaxies, 300 million light years away—merging galaxies NGC 4676.

And now, after 27 songs, we come to the subject of Life in the Cosmos.

The staff at Comfortable Universe Headquarters is prepared to make a bold, uncompromising claim and we have a common-sense argument to back it up:

Life is EVERYWHERE!

Exhibit A: Earth 4.2 billion years ago (bya).  Recent genetic analysis indicates that the LUCA life form—the “Last Universal Common Ancestor” of all surviving life—lived at that time. That is just a few hundred million years after Earth came into existence.

Could something flick life’s light switch on that fast if it was a rare and uncommon event?

Importantly, LUCA was a surprisingly complex organism. It already had to have a long history of evolution, which suggests that it lived in a diverse microbial community including predatory viruses. LUCA had a cell membrane enclosing its cytoplasm, which included DNA, RNA, and Ribosomes (the tools required to build proteins). Its DNA encoded around 2600 different proteins and included a simple immune system called CRISPR that protects it from invading viruses.

Clearly, LUCA was far from the original simple entity that first crossed the threshold from inorganic blob to living thing.

And it is the crossing of that mysterious threshold that we most want to focus on here in Song 28. Based on the LUCA genetic analysis and on geologic studies of Earth’s early history and on fossil evidence, it had to happen super-fast (by Cosmic and geologic standards). Earth consolidated from the protoplanetary disk about 4.54bya; and there is already evidence for liquid water on Earth by 4.4bya. 200 million years later, you had LUCA.

There are two ways to view the story of the first crude life forms—the amorphous blobs that first crossed the threshold from inorganic ‘posers’ to self-sustaining, self-replicating guardians of their own identities.  The first view is that it only happened once.  The argument there (which is statistically nearly impossible to defend) is that if it happened more than once, science would have found completely unrelated versions of living things, i.e., with no genetic common features.  Even arguing how that could work is a problem if both of these entities use the same inorganic building blocks as their raw material.  The two life forms would have to have completely different internal structures and chemistry.  Even today’s organisms, known to have lots of genes in common (humans share 60% of the same DNA with bananas) have drastically different metabolic pathways and interact with their environments in completely different ways.

No, it seems far more likely that what happened is that life formed multiple times in the gigantic worldwide long-running lab experiment that began 4.4bya (more on this in a moment), but then one (our LUCA) found a competitive advantage, began to dominate its ecosystem and effectively overwhelmed all of the other members of its community.  There is an analogy here to human beings.  Once, not long ago, Homo sapiens shared the landscape with several other Homo species, but we outcompeted them and/or assimilated them to the point that all others have lost their species identities and/or gone extinct.

So ... from habitability (liquid water on a chemically diverse, well-mixed rocky crust) to the first spark of life in somewhere between zero and *well before* 200 million years? This is the key basis of our Song of Everything’s common-sense argument that life is everywhere.

After that … after life gets started … perhaps a lot of the habitable planets in the universe run into problems. But once that spark is ignited, we don’t care! Read on for the continuation of the argument.

LUCA’s home—Earth 4.2bya—would seem like a living hell to us. It was under constant heavy bombardment by a rain of large and small meteors, asteroids, and rock fragments that were still roaming the proto-planetary disc. LUCA probably lived in deep, extremely active hydrothermal vents, which were the byproducts of these continuous impacts.

According to latest research, summarized in the 21 January 2026 PBS NOVA episode entitled “Asteroids: Spark of Life,” life may have had its start and actually its ‘heyday’ during that heavy early meteor bombardment in the Hadean Epoch of Earth, when a deep layer of the crust was constantly being seeded with the chemical raw materials for life and churned and stirred by the impacts, creating millions or billions of highly active hydrothermal vents worldwide.

Here’s a Chemistry thought experiment: How many chemical components did the first spark of life require to be gathered and arranged ‘just so’? 100? 1000? How many years of actively mixing these components in a hot soup of nearly boiling water in one single hydrothermal vent are needed to get all these components properly arranged? Can you imagine such a chemical experiment running in a lab for 1000 years? A million years? The famous 1952 Miller-Urey experiment got significant results, and it was run for ONLY ONE WEEK!

Come on! The entire Earth was seething with hydrothermal vents, constantly being blasted by more impacts. We didn’t have just one lone isolated experiment—we had millions or billions of them! And they weren’t running for just seven days but continuously for hundreds and thousands of years! All to just get a handful of chemical components to combine in a fairly straightforward configuration. This is NOT brain surgery! Come on, people! Common sense.

Isn’t it just the most natural, most likely conclusion that the first crude life forms were already living and thriving well before 100 frikkin’ million years? It only took 50 million years to raise the Himalayas from sea level.  As these early organisms crossed various simple thresholds of self-preservation and self-replication, they would have taken more and more charge of their own development.

Would you bet against it happening somewhere amid millions to billions of different experiments being run in a planet-wide laboratory with 197 million square miles of floor space, with the various experiments being run non-stop for even just ONE MILLION YEARS? Hell, no! I sure wouldn’t.

How about 100,000 years? (With the first Lab techs not even able to write—their notebooks being crude images drawn on cave walls?) Still probably a safe bet.

Life in its simplest single-cell form is just not that special. You could think of it as just a little more complicated version of fire.

But … “Intelligent” life? Human beings? That’s a whole different story.

Earth 4.2bya was not a place that could have evolved intelligent life as we understand it; and, as we said earlier, this Song 28 just doesn’t care about that.

Forget about the vaunted Drake Equation and the speculations regarding the Fermi Paradox. (Where are all our cognitive, symbolic-reasoning, technological neighbors? Are we really the only ones?)

Our Comfortable Universe’s adamant claim is that if there is or was a Great Pan-Cosmic Intergalactic Empire, it is and/or was run by the simplest of single-cell microbes.

It just makes sense.

On Earth, the appearance of the kind of intelligent life that we’re familiar and comfortable with took more than Four Billion Years, and many, many accidents of evolution. THAT seems to be a huge long-shot by comparison to the simple single-celled organisms who have ruled our planet almost since the beginning.

Those—the simple humble microbes—are far more competent space travelers—far more versatile, adaptable, and hardy than our fragile human bodies.

Now ... about that interstellar travel.  We go back to Earth 4.2bya: Some of those constant meteor impacts were spewing rocks back out into space.  And riding on/in these rocks were our early extremophile organisms. These natural spaceships would have now been travelling the cosmos for 4 billion years.

Buried deep in a cocoon of solid rock, where our organisms are protected from all radiation, these space-farers, who could be traveling upwards of a few hundred kilometers per second (which is 1/1000^th the speed of light and is a conservative estimate for the upper limit for how fast such objects could be flung into space from a collision) will have traveled at least 4 million light years already.  That means they could have easily reached the Galaxy Andromeda and its 1 trillion stars by now, not to mention potentially seeding life on every single habitable planet in our entire Milky Way.

Conversely, every one of those billion or more habitable planets across the Milky Way probably had their own Hadean Epoch bombardment and their own chemical experiments going on early in their histories; and, we argue, assuming our Earth is nothing too extraordinary, many or most of those planets may also have spawned life, given how quickly it happened here. The resulting ejected objects would be ubiquitous and should be passing through our solar system regularly.

To date, we know of just three interstellar visitors: 1I/Oumuamua (2017), 2I/Borisov (2019) and the recent 3I/ATLAS that is just now exiting our solar system. But we can only see the big ones. There have probably been MANY smaller ones that have escaped detection.

There are several other ways that Cosmic space probes with our simple microbes could have been launched. On the other end of the size scale from planet-bombarding meteors and rocks, astronomers have discovered a handful of ‘hypervelocity stars’ that have been ejected from the Milky Way, probably by encounters with the super-massive black hole at the galaxy’s center. To date, the fastest of these, S5-HVS1, is traveling at 1,755 km/s (3,930,000 mph), almost 0.6% of the speed of light!

If whole stars, probably accompanied by planetary systems, are known to be traveling at speeds easily capable of reaching other galaxies, then how many smaller objects are out there doing the same thing?

The Crab Nebula, courtesy of NASA/ESA.  Remnants of supernova that exploded in 1054AD, sending material traveling outward at 1500 km per second.

There are even more violent events going on, which could yield even faster speeds—from supernovas (such as the Crab Nebula shown above) to galaxy collisions (see the opening image).

In terms of intergalactic space travel, our Universe seems to have it covered, folks.

* * *

Now here’s the practical homework assignment for us supposedly intelligent life forms: If we are at all serious about establishing an interstellar space program, BY FAR the cheapest, most efficient and most technologically feasible way available for us to get started TODAY is to organize a systematic “search and intercept” system for any interstellar objects that visit our own solar system.

Imagine if Charles Darwin could have collected his samples of species from around the world by simply deploying a big net outside his office rather than embarking on the expensive and time-consuming multi-year expedition aboard the HMS Beagle.

The long-established practice of collecting light arriving at Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos has already proven its worth many times over. We argue that collecting material samples, and especially drill cores that sample the undisturbed interior, from passing interstellar visitors will also prove to have a huge cost-benefit advantage over those dreamed-of deep space expeditions.

What can we expect to find in samples from the visiting interstellar ‘spaceships’?

We won’t know until we look, of course. Regardless of the discovery of any signatures of life, samples from a variety of interstellar objects will be invaluable in improving our understanding of the formation and evolution of … Everything … from stars and their planetary systems through our galaxy’s structure, and even the universe itself.

Here’s a sampler of some of the surprises we could find: The average interstellar object is likely to be old for two reasons. The first is just because the rock had to travel a long way from some other system to get here. But the second could be far more interesting. The universe has been creating rocks for a long time, and those oldest rocks could tell stories of this ancient history that we cannot see with our telescopes.

Even the astounding new discoveries of distant galaxies that the James Webb Space Telescope is making have their limits. There have been tantalizing hints of galaxies that seem far more mature than our Standard Cosmological Model can explain. But the farther back in time you try to look, the fainter and noisier and more distorted the signal is likely to be.

But if the Standard Model is right in assuming that the structure and evolution of the universe is and was the same everywhere, then the same stuff was happening right here in our backyard, and those early events had to leave behind their calling cards—debris from all the chaotic formation and destruction of generations of big and little objects.

Theory says that the first stars did not and could not produce any rocks directly. The best current theories suggest that these first stars were short lived.  Many of them exploded within just a few million years, leaving behind the first heavy elements that could then begin to consolidate into the first rocks. But how fast those first rocks might have formed is entirely unknown. That’s one huge reason why a program to seek out and study the interstellar and intergalactic rocks in our neighborhood could be so important.

What science knows about that first generation of stars (stupidly called Population III stars for historical reasons) is sketchy at best, because they have never been observed—not even one of them. They’re long gone, and so the ones we could see in the distant past are just too far away.

Therefore, the speculation about how these stars behaved is entirely based on theory … and the theory that science is using is not equipped to adequately deal with such small things as individual stars. The Standard Model of Cosmology starts from a sweeping assumption of a homogeneous and isotropic universe—smooth and uniform everywhere you look at all scales. It is therefore silent on the subject of the nature of the little local density fluctuations needed to start individual stars forming.

The Standard Model doesn’t even have a good grip on the much bigger density fluctuations that we have evidence for—the observed 1-in-100,000 fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background, which we discussed at length in Song 25. Those “210-foot-high hills in a 70-mile-wide landscape” produced our observed galaxies and galaxy clusters; but the way they formed and evolved (in the Standard Model) depends on the unknown structure and unknown behavior of the unknown stuff called Dark Matter (*Cold* Dark Matter is specifically assumed in the Standard Model); so, it’s all just more speculation and guesswork.

Getting our hands on one of those extremely old first rocks and studying them would be like travelling 13 billion light years across the universe and back. Talk about precious!

C’mon, NASA! Get those astronauts on your South-Pole Moon Base to work capturing interstellar objects, please! Wouldn’t it make a lot of sense sending missions to land on a future Oumuamua and collecting samples? It seems at least as productive as sending people all the way to Mars.

Meanwhile, explain why it’s smarter to send human beings to Mars *instead* of bringing back the rock samples already collected by Perseverance. And please send a fleet of robotic missions to search for life on Europa, Titan, Enceladus, etc.

The world is waiting! We are eager to meet our Intergalactic Companions!