The Story (as of today)

Here it is:


A long, long time ago there was something like a point, but not really, of infinite mass and zero space. And then it began to expand, and then really expand (Inflation Theory), and in those first few moments, all the building blocks for our Universe were created in a crescendo of matter-antimatter collisions, with but .00001% of matter surviving, and that small remainder is everything. 


With ever further expansion came cooling and with that matter condensed out of energy, and then matter joined with matter to make a nucleus, which caught an electron, and an atom was born. Hydrogen and Helium filled the universe in great clouds, swirling and twisting with the currents of energy rippling through space, and over hundreds of thousands of years these great clouds condensed down into hot swirling points and BAM! The first stars were born, giant monsters living and dying in a few thousand years and then BAAAMMM! A massive explosion, and the first stellar Black Hole is born, and begins eating, pulling everything towards it. And this relentless pull pushes more clouds of hydrogen and helium to condense, creating stars and stars and ever more stars, some of these giving birth to more Black Holes, which start to merge, growing ever larger, ordering more and more clutches of stars in orbit around them, and the first galaxies were born.

Stars of hydrogen and helium create ever heavier metals, like carbon and oxygen, nitrogen and lithium, and this second generation of stars creates ever more heavier metals, like Iron, and in the biggest explosions of stars, everything denser than Iron is created in an instant - gold, silver, uranium, etc.  And we - life - is made up of these heavier metals. Iron courses through our very blood, and there is only one place in existence where Iron is created: A star.


Life spawned on one planet orbiting one star in a vast sea of billions of stars in billions of galaxies in maybe billions of Universes, and spread from the sea to the land. Evolution relentlessly shaped forms and functions through success and many millions of years later, here we are, you and I, contemplating it all. Brains made of up of hundreds of billions of neurons communicating electronically over a galaxy of connections, producing these very words that I type, you read, you and me - made of this very Universe, with a mind able to wonder why.


We live in an infinite sea of realities, dimensions and times beyond our comprehension and yet still, we can strive and imagine, this fantastic existence we call ours: Blessed to live in this, the Golden Era.


For our future is grim; the earth will be burnt and destroyed hundreds of times over; our galaxy will merge with Andromeda, sending each into a chaos lasting a billion years, and many, many billion more, space will be so stretched out there will be no stars in the night sky, as all matter is so far apart from other matter that there is, nothing. Stretched to infinity, cold and dark and eternal, as time will stop, motion will stop, the credits will say: Fin.


But that is all meaningless other than in a poetic way: We are here, now, alive and able to ask, Why? And "Why?" is the most powerful force ever released in this grand play.