And now for something completely different.
Today we'll begin a three part series on pre-history.
That is, all of the stuff that happened in the universe
before anyone had the courtesy to write it all down.
Because let's be honest, dinosaurs are horrid note-takers.
Part 1 of our intrepid adventure will cover astronomy
and take us from the big bang to the Earth.
So now let us begin with the task of fitting
13.8 billion years of cold, hard science
into 10 warm, soft minutes.
This is the beginning.
To make this easier for all of us,
let's give ourselves a protagonist to follow.
For the sake of argument, let's call him Bruce.
Now back in the day little Brucey here was a particle,
swimming around with a bunch of other particles
in an incredibly small, dense space.
Everything is going fine until someone somewhere
decided to push the party button,
and then suddenly everything went everywhere
and Bruce got to see a lot of crazy stuff.
So, to begin with, everything was mostly tiny subatomic particles, like Bruce, flying off into space.
Very shortly after they decided that they could turn it up to 11 and go even faster.
So the universe started inflating, and rapidly.
At this point, not even a trillionth of a second had gone by
when Bruce found himself abruptly in the middle of a turf war between two rival gangs that had sprung up,
matter and anti-matter.
Now these guys do not like each other. If they so much as touch, they'll go poof.
Just like your grades after you decided to pick up watching Game of Thrones halfway through the semester.
So anti-matter bit their thumb at matter and then everybody got into a giant tussle,
and short story long, almost all of the anti-matter got completely annihilated.
So whereas we briefly had a nice half and half between the two,
we now have far less anti-matter than we have matter.
Great. We're not even one second into the universe and we already have genocide.
Off to a roaring start, we are.
So now that Bruce has thoroughly been traumatized by the gang war that he's been exposed to,
we move on to the three minute mark,
where all of the elementary particles, like Bruce,
formed polygamous unions, which we now know by the names of protons, neutrons, and electrons.
Here's where our time scale starts slowing down a bit.
500,000 years later - yeah, I know, big jump -
Bruce is part of one of the first hydrogen atoms.
And 1 billion years later, Bruce is part of a galaxy.
It's at about this time that colors decided to exist, so things start getting pretty.
Before we see anymore of Bruce's story though,
I should tell you something about how we got to the idea of the Big Bang in the first place.
It's about light, most commonly known as that thing you leave on in the bathroom at night
so the hallway monsters don't get you in your sleep.
Light is really fast, but it has limits, and it doesn't travel instantaneously.
It has a constant speed, that while blisteringly fast,
still takes approximately 8 or so minutes to get from the Sun to the Earth.
But even so, the Sun is pretty close, and light from other parts of the Milky Way can take years to get to us.
With other galaxies, it can take millions or billions of years even.
What that means is that when you look up at space with your telescope,
not only are you getting in touch with your inner pirate,
you see everything as it was when the light left it, not as it is right now.
That means far-off galaxies look to us now like they did millions or billions of years ago.
So we're literally looking back in time. Isn't that sweet?
The farther away we look, and therefore the further back in time we look,
the simpler the galaxies are.
Which means that space was much less cluttered back in the day.
The other component to this stuff is the Doppler effect.
The gist of the Doppler effect is that when two things
are moving towards each other, the wavelength of anything between them,
in this case light, is shortened from perspective of the object,
which in this case translates to blue shifting of light.
Meanwhile, when they're moving away from each other, the wavelength is elongated,
which means the colors of the light are shifted toward red.
The same principle also applies to sound waves as well,
which is why sirens always sound like they're decreasing in pitch
after the cop cars blow past you to get the other guy,
but sound like they're increasing when they're gaining on you.
The short of it is that when we look out at space, everything looks a tad bit red, which as we now know,
means everything is moving away from us.
Red: If you ask me, it's probably because the other galaxies didn't want to catch our ebola.
Or, maybe it was something we said. Blue: Do you mind?
Red: Hah, sorry. Blue: But either way, when we play this thing in reverse,
everything is moving toward some centre point,
which we now know from Brucey was elementary particle party central,
i.e. the point where the Big Bang happened.
In conclusion, light is pretty frickin' cool.
The more you know.
So one thing led to another, and Bruce finds himself in a giant cloud of spacegas,
which I can assume is what you breathe when you eat your space jam,
and this cloud is called a nebula.
They initially form due to gravity's habbit of pulling together any particles that happen to be close to each other,
and after these nebulas form, they begin to collapse and flatten, also due to gravity.
When the nebula collapses it also starts to spin, because physics.
Thankfully, Bruce dominated that spinning teacup ride at Disneyworld, so he's not feeling queasy in the slightest.
The nebula continues spinning on its merry way,
and eventually the middle of the disc condences enough to become a star.
Now, stars are cool. They're in a constant equilibrium between collapsing under their own weight
and exploding out into space because of all the fusion they're doing inside of them.
So, at this point, Bruce is chilling in the star, except he's actually on fire,
enjoying the constant Michael Bay movie that is cosmic nuclear fusion.
But the problem with fusion is that sometimes it gets too hot, hot damn, and unable to call the police or the firemen,
the star continues using this now excessive heat,
which results in the star fusion hydrogen en helium into heavier elements inside its core.
Red: Me again! The heavy stuff like iron only starts forming in the star after it starts running low on hydrogen
and is forced to resort to fusing helium instead, which requires more energy and can't sustain the star for as long.
Consequently, the star generally burns out and dies shortly thereafter,
which has the happy consequence of flinging all these newly created heavier elements all over the universe,
which is how they ended up, you know, everywhere.
Blue: Don't you have anything better to do right now than mess with my video?
Red: Dude, my university is on the quartersystem. I won't have class for another week.
Blue: This right here is where we get most of the elements, even the elements that you yourself were made from.
Yup, you're made from dead stars buddy boy, which, depending on your outlook, is either super awesome
or totally morbid. Or both, I don't descriminate.
So, that's the star. There are other kinds of stars as well, like red giants, blue giants, white dwarfs, and red dwarfs.
Bruce happens to be in a blue giant right now, which is giant, super bright, blue, and short-lived.
So just as Bruce is getting nice and cosy in there, everything goes to hell because the star goes supernova
and explodes out into a bunch of other elements, and what's left of the core turns into a black hole out of spite.
Our favourite particle, Bruce, escapes the explosion,
and he realises that while he's been enjoying the comfort of being inside a star for so long -
Red: - Surprise! Space went crazy and decided to make a galaxy full of hundreds of billions of stars!
Blue: You know, I'm really not feeling this whole "you interrupt me all the time"-business.
Red: It's informative! Blue: Tragically seperated from his home,
Bruce travels around spacen wondering where it all went wrong, when he comes across another nebula.
Keen to avoid being in another explosion,
Bruce sticks to the outside of the nebula in the hope of becoming one of the planets,
while the centre of the nebula will begin fusing and go on to become a star.
When the nebula's disc fully collapses though, the rim of stuff along the star will be spinning around,
and tiny bits will smack into each other and stick together before smacking into more tiny bits along the nebula's ring.
Lots of smacking later, the dust and gas it creates into what are called planetesimals,
which, of course, smack into each other more to form larger and larger objects, until we get planets.
Now, Brucey likes to live on the edge, so instead of being in a star,
he's enjoying living on a planet in an area we call a habitable zone,
where everything doesn't either burn up or freeze to death. Man, space is unforgiving.
Red: Speaking of freezing, the outher lost terrestrial planets are mostly ice ice baby,
the middle planets are mostly rock and roll, and the inner most planets are mostly heavy metal.
Beyond all those are the gas giants, which, as far as Bruce is concerned, are just, you know, things that exist.
Anyway, since our boy Bruce is in the habitable zone, looks like he's rockin' out.
Blue: Why don't you ever get attacked by ninjas? Red: Oh please,
any living thing with the capacity for thought knows better than to attack me in my own YouTube channel.
Oh God! Unliving, unthinking robot-pirates! My one weakness!
Blue: So Bruce is enjoying himself on his new earthy home when suddenly,
a giant rock the size of Mars crashes into Earth in a poor attempt at flirting.
This is bad news for our recently formed Earth, as the collision sends the Earth into what we now call Hadean era,
where everything is pretty much made of lava or on fire.
While all of this is going on, the stuff from the collision gets blown up in space
and forms what we now know to be the Moon.
Good game gravity, am I right?
The last big thing to happen to Brucey's home planet is that, when the Earth is temporarily a giant ball of fire and death,
material separates out between light rock mantle above and heavy metal core below thanks to, you guessed it, gravity.
Oh gravity, you're the only fundamental force for me.