Billions of Years

Galaxy earth

Time is the motion of particles relative to each other. From a scientific perspective, without motion and without matter there is no time. If the material universe had a beginning, time as we know it began when the universe began. But science can postulate no such beginning.

None of us, including scientists, grasps reality whole. With incomplete knowledge, physicists grasp the universe as energy (E), equal to mass (M) times the speed of light (C) squared (Emc2). Any old mass, including rock, has energy, detectable when its molecules are split. And astronomers gather that the universe is expanding, that galaxies have been moving away from a dense configuration for the past 15 billion years.

Scientists have mapped celestial bodies as best they can. The nearest galaxy to our galaxy, the Milky Way, would take 2 million years to span at the speed of light (299,793 kilometers or 186,291 miles per second). The farthest known object in the universe known to us in is believed to be at a distance that takes light to travel in about 10 billion light years. In other words, what we see today of this object is that object 10 billion years ago. And for the map of celestial bodies to make sense, the universe has to be more than 10 billion years old.

Geologists claim the age of the sun and earth to be around 4.550 billion years and that the sun is moving around our galaxy at roughly 500,000 miles per hour. One revolution around the galaxy is said to take 200 million years. Dividing 4,550 by 200 makes 23 revolutions around our galaxy since the sun and earth formed. Ten thousand years covers only one twenty-thousandth of a revolution.

Geologists describe the earth as having come together gravitationally. Hot and fluid energy was condensing into what we know as solids. The denser matter (iron and nickel) settled at the center. The less dense matter, in the form of rocks, rose to the surface. And, as the earth gave off heat, its outer layers cooled first, leaving Earth's interior hot and molten. Gasses bubbled to the surface, eventually to become atmosphere. When the temperature was right, gasses in the atmosphere produced clouds that contained moisture - hydrogen and oxygen. It began to rain, and water began to cover much of the earth's surface.

Among the chemicals on the Earth's surface were two nucleic acids: DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and RNA (ribonucleic acid). These acids could divide and replicate themselves. Biologists claim that earliest forms of life consisted of carbon, water, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphor, sulfur and other materials. Although they were not discovered until the 19th century, micro-organisms existed, presumably, and these organisms could mutate genetically. Knowledge of this is established to the extent that biologists can alter a characteristic in mice, for example, that will be passed to their offspring.

Biologists have theorized about millions of years of genetic development, of plant-life and spineless creatures that developed in ocean water. Vegetable life in the form of algae transferred to land and became more complex - and became nutrition for creatures that crawled out of the ocean.

Life that was dependant on movement in chosen directions for nutrition had a brain. Life that got its nutrition without mobility did not need a brain and did not develop a brain.

This book explains in clear terms the role exercise plays in our mental processes. Moving our muscles produces proteins that play roles in our highest thought processes. Ratey says, "thinking is the internalization of movement." He illustrates this with the story of the sea squirt that hatches with a rudimentary spinal cord and 300 brain cells. It has only hours to find a spot of coral on which to put down roots or die. When it does put down roots, it eats its brain. According to Ratey only a moving animal needs a brain.

Scientists calculate that more than 3.5 billion years after the earth had formed - around 230 to 220 million years ago - dinosaurs first appeared. They estimate that the age of the dinosaurs (the Jurassic Period) began 20 million years later. Around perhaps it was 80 million years later that mammals first appeared - in the form of small nocturnal creatures that fed on insects and nursed their young. Paleontologists describe dinosaurs as having become extinct 65 million years ago, with birds and other smaller creatures being able to survive. Scientists calculate that 38 million years ago primates appeared - creatures resembling those we call monkeys and apes.

Biologists speak of variation between species and within species - a specie being creatures that can interbreed. Within a specie, imprecise replications occur from parent to offspring - unlike cloning. Across a great span of time, some variations survived and other variations did not.

The fossil of an ape that lived around 10 million years ago has been discovered in a volcanic mud deposit in what is today northern Kenya. It is considered among those primates that preceded gorillas, chimps and humans. To quote the the science reporter for the BBC, Helen Briggs, "Genetic studies suggest that the ancestors of humans and chimpanzees went along their separate pathways of evolution about five million to seven million years ago."

According to findings at an archaeological site in what today is southeastern Spain, 1.8 million years ago the following creatures lived side by side: giant hyenas, saber-toothed cats, zebras, giraffes, gazelles, wolves, wild boar and lynx (BBC, October 30, 2007).

DNA analysis suggests that around 700,000 years ago humans and Neanderthal began diverging from a common ancestor.

Humans (homo sapiens) are said to have lived about 60 thousand years ago in Africa. The poetic describe humans as below the angels, and indeed humans have survival techniques similar to other earthbound creatures that move around to get nourishment, including the unangelic ability to excrete what they ingest but cannot use.

Humans have a chemistry that makes fighting and empathy possible, the latter allowing them to live in a group, which adds to their ability to survive. They remain dependent on environmental circumstances to live and on their body chemistry for sanity.

Like other living things that move around to get nourishment, they have the ability to make choices. And they have the ability to reflect.