The Universe: Smaller than Previously Thought

It begins with a tiny flash of light.


Not that there's anything for the light to shine upon- or anywhere to go, for that matter. This tiny point, rapidly expanding, is all that is. In seconds it's become vaster than the solar system, in hours bigger than the Galaxy. This space is instantly filled with a roiling plasma of free particles, the energy of that first flash curdled into the beginnings of matter. Some 400,000 years later, the flash is still echoing around the much bigger universe, and the plasma has cooled into hydrogen and a smattering of helium gas.
As uncountable centuries pass, tiny impurities in the cosmic oyster force the clouds of gas to accrete into vast loops and clumps, the progenitors to what we now call galactic superclusters. As the billenia tick forward, and the clumps become ever more dense, a minor miracle happens.
For the first time since THE flash, light is streaming out into the universe. Some of this hyrdrogen gas has gotten so dense it's actually collapsed in on itself under its own gravity. What now? It's so hot it's actually fusing into helium, and onward to carbon, and yet further. This first star (even though it was probably thousands of solar masses) is only a feeble herald of the electric wonder of the galaxies, which inevitably follow. To an outside observer, our universe is now a much different place. Where pitch black clouds once silently drifted, vast globs and spirals of light drape and swirl.
The first supermassive stars continue the trend toward the heavier elements. As they end their remarkably short and violent lives, they immolate thousands of lightyears with deadly radiation and high energy particles. Like a forest fire, though, this death lays the seeds of new life. The shockwave from the blast generates vast new areas of starbirth, but with an interesting new twist. The high energy particles shooting out into the universe have slammed into each other on their way out, forming yet heavier elements and enriching the once-bland clouds of hydrogen and helium.
Another miracle! Eventually enough of these vast stellar deaths have occurred to enrich a great deal of every galaxy (and thusly the next generation of stars) with heavier, more complex elements . This new stellar crop produces something wholly remarkable- the first planets.
Many of these planets will never produce anything worthy of remark. Too many will be born in the hearts of galaxies, waiting to be scoured by a burst of gamma ray light. Too many will be born with a larger gas-giant planet in a close orbit- slinging comets in their direction every few million years, sterilizing the surface each time. Some will simply be too poor in crucial elements like silicon or carbon, which could concievably form the bases for complex organisms. But at least one is none of these things.
And while it may seem like this particular world is favored somehow, it has a fair share of hardships. Early on, a body the size of Mars will crash into this world, nearly destroying it and launching up a cloud of debris that will eventually form a moon (or if you prefer, The Moon.) Some complex organic molecules do manage to form on the surface, though, and they quickly replicate themselves much as crystals spread through solution. Unlike crystals, though, there is a large potential for an error in the process- a potential for mutation. Whole families of the molecules pop up, differentiating and competing in the fetid sludge of our 'lucky' planet. Time passes...
...and it would hardly do to call them molecules now. It's life, and it's in the skies, lumbering along the ground, and slithering through the oceans. Another bump in the road! An unfortunate asteroid, or possibly a comet, passes too close to the planet in question, and plunges into the atmosphere. It could have easily stopped there....but it didn't. Life, threatened, responded to the new challenge with a bewildering new variety of forms: faster, smarter and far more adapted to the new climate. Let's call them mammals. Time passes...
and they've progressed toward something we can call 'sentience.' In a remarkably short time, the sludge of the oceans has risen onto two feet and can haltingly concieve of a self- scrawled onto the cave walls. An ice age! Still more hardship. For our warm-blooded heroes, this could easily have been the end. Fortunately, though, these fairly complex mammals manage to develop cultures, and eventually hit upon the idea of symbolic representation- ideas become spoken words, which become written words. The crude cave sketches are merely a shadow of the immediate flourishing of thought under the mammals, and yet things are still hard.
They war, and disease is always ready to end the lives of the unwary. Most of them live either in hunter-gatherer squalor, or under tyranny. Miraculously, though, some are able to see beyond the limitless misery and avoid the traps of life, and begin to surmise their birthright. The inconcievably vast cradle that birthed them, the universe itself, is no longer a dome over the village. As the short centuries fly by, they develop increasingly accurate models of their world- moving inexorably closer to truth.
Using their languages and technologies, they are able to pass these ideas from parent to child, from teacher to student, from television studio to entire nation. The abstract world of ideas bursts forth, and surrounds the entirety of the planet with cables, antennae, and satellites. Things really have never been better.
Whole institutions are formed as conduits to this abstracted world, palaces built in honor of education. In the course of her tenantry at one of these institutions, imagine that one of them registers for a 'class' designed solely to impart knowledge of the universe onto the students. She slogs through weeks of basic information, things she's heard since grade school. Finally the transcendental peeks through- the class has moved onward to honest-to-god cosmology, and this one particular tiny bit of the universe, our heroine, is presented with the place of her ultimate origin. And yet after all that, things still aren't that easy. Our heroine could easily be distracted by everyday life, or friends. This doesn't happen though, and one particular day in class she feels a bit of resonance with an idea up for discussion- the very expansion of the universe we live in. Her curiosity overwhelms the social pressure to stay quiet and listen- she raises her hand.

"What does the expanding universe mean to us today? How will it impact our lives at all?"

"Well, because it's expanding, the universe will tend to get larger."

And just like that, it's over. The professor has moved on, and our heroine may or may not feel the need to investigate further.


What have I been getting at? In my opinion, the story of the universe is pretty much one of the most awe-inspiring and mindbending things I've ever been confronted with. I can't see how you could get a damn DOCTORATE in astronomy and not feel the same way. Yet somehow, this amazing legacy of how we got here hasn't been presented as anything but horrifyingly dull and boring. Every time anyone actually got interested enough in the material to raise their hand and ask a question in front of a huge lecture class, our loving professor answered the question by either repeating it without a question mark, or giving an answer so simplified and dull it verged on falsehood.
I've wanted to be a nanotechnologist, an author, and a composer. For now, I want to be a physicist- and come hell or high water, if I teach an introductory class like this, you can be damn sure that my students get an idea of how absolutely amazing the universe actually IS.