According to many scientists and one big telescope, 13.8 billion years ago, what we now know as the universe was a very small ball with infinite density and high heat, called the Singularity. At some point, the Singularity explodes, creating matter, light, cosmic microwave backgrounds, radiation, subatomic particles, simple atoms and a slew of other nerd p*rn. This is the Big Bang.
After the Big Bang, there are billions of years of star making. They burn brightly and often alone, only to be marveled at millions of years after their death. Galaxies are shaped, gas lays itself as a veil over chunks of rock gently circling incandescent orbs of helium and hydrogen.
A particularly attractive rock emerges about 11 billion years into this show. It is blue and green and unlike any other known planet in its ability to create many different lifeforms, beginning with bacteria and algae, later joined by sponges, jellyfish and horseshoe crabs. After basting in a primordial soup for 7 or so billion years, scorpions and centipedes scuttle out of its oceans onto sandy shores. It’s Earth’s awkward phase.
By 230 million years, we’ve got a problem on our hands. Dinosaurs are chasing each other around and mucking the place up. A comet or asteroid, passing by earth and seeing it littered with scorpions and giant lizards, does a double take and crashes into the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The dinosaurs die but scorpions survive. And snakes 😫.
After the “Chixulub Impactor,” which is the name of the asteroid event and not a club in Cancun, the dust settles and Nature hits reset. This time around, we get rats. The universe is now f*cking with us. Eventually though, the mammals grow cuter. Plants bloom and nuts get crackin’. 225 million or so years after this phase, hominids show up. Some are chill and content to be chimps, but others break off to become hom*o Erectus. When the chimps hear their relatives’ new surname, they burst out laughing and tell them to f*ck off. hom*o Erectus retreats into caves and stays there for millions of years, playing with tools and fire, maturing into Neanderthals and eventually emerging as the swoon-worthy hom*o Sapiens about 200,000 years ago. Classic geek-turns-babe story.
Within hom*o Sapiens, another universe has taken shape — one of lobes, not planets, neurological pathways, not orbits. A universe of logic and imagination, instinct and emotion.
From inside this roiling universe come stories. They emerge as sound, then words. They appear as images painted in caves and etchings carved into stone, and eventually ink on parchment. Once humans start telling their stories, nothing can shut them up. Except saber tooth tigers.
The humans look upward into their star spangled obsidian nights and wonder. There is already the knowledge of what is, but also the curiosity of “why?” and “what else?”
They track the little dots of light, believing the sky has answers. They crave understanding. Their stories become tales of higher beings with the great powers and knowledge that they themselves lack. These tales become heirlooms, passed from generation to generation. The heirlooms become religion.
Starting in 35,000 B.C., humans begin painting bones with ochre and burying their loved ones with periwinkles, dolls, and blades — equipping them for an afterlife. Burial sites and temples emerge. Stonehenge is built around 3,000 B.C., followed by the Great Pyramid of Egypt 500 years later. Zeus and his 12 Olympians show up somewhere around 1,300 B.C. and now it’s a party.
As humans move through the ages, we get goddess worship in Crete, the first stab at monotheism in Egypt, sacred texts like the Upanishads and Torah, Muhammed’s Revelations, Confucius and the Tao te Ching, the Old Testament, Guatama Buddha, the return of polytheism in Rome (Zeus is back after a stint in jail for kidnapping and murder, but he’s changed his name to Jupiter). Jesus of Nazareth is born, and the Romans lose their damn minds.
An important note here: All the civilizations are on different calendars this whole time, so in what we now know as the 6th century, a monk named Dionysius Exiguus decides that we’re all starting from zero the year Jesus is born (which was actually 4 B.C.).
Everyone who is bad at subtraction groans.
Oh yeah, math is here, too. The ancient Egyptians used geometry and algebra to build their pyramids, but it’s the Greeks who take math to the next level. They apply deductive reasoning to make advances in surveying, structural and mechanical engineering, bookkeeping, lunar and solar calendars, and craftmaking.
Logic and order and observation have grown in the world. But so have imagination and wonder. While Alexander the Great is strategizing profoundly successful military maneuvers across Western Asia, the poet Hesiod is writing about a Pegasus flying out of Medusa’s neck.
Two planets orbiting in our minds. One side needed to survive and thrive and the other to lift and inspire.
Eons later, we’re still doing the same tango. We need our imagination and faith. If only logic ruled, we wouldn’t eat moldy cheese, jet around in metal birds, enjoy Picasso and jazz — or look beyond ourselves to something better. An afterlife, say. A spiritual connection to a higher realm.
On the other hand, imagination without logic and reason has brought us witch trials, anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, QAnon and thousands of other cults, and rise of fake news.
There is so much we don’t know about our universe. 200,000 years into human existence, we are still wondering about the “why” and “what else?”
Is the Big Bang real?
Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs?
Are we alone?
Is there a God?
Why does Gen Alpha think Ohio is cringe?
Despite these questions, there is so much we do know. Through our shared history, we’ve seen further, discovered more, expanded our learning and gained a greater ability to preserve and enrich our lives by gripping tight to what we know is true.
Those truthy, grippy things are called “facts.” Facts can be observed, repeated and proven. They come from empirical evidence — not Reddit threads or autocrats with spray tans. They are not bound to our logic or imagination. They exist beyond our opinions, our educated guesses, our beliefs, our anxieties, and our dreams.
Facts are life jackets and channel markers. They are safety nets and helmets. Facts are annoying. Inconvenient. Confusing. Sometimes horrible to accept. But at the same time, facts can free us from our fears. Calm and comfort. Illuminate and protect.
Facts have nothing to do with intuition, or “gut feelings” — which are individualized responses based on personal experience. Here’s a lil nugget from some smarties at Harvard that I found interesting:
Scientists call the stomach the “second brain” for a reason. There’s a vast neural network of 100 million neurons lining your entire digestive tract … When you approach a decision intuitively, your brain works in tandem with your gut to quickly assess all your memories, past learnings, personal needs, and preferences and then makes the wisest decision given the context. In this way, intuition is a form of emotional and experiential data.
All to say, guts are great, but they aren’t facts. Facts can be counterintuitive and complex. And that’s when they start to lose followers.
We’ve entered into a world where we defer to feelings and desires more than evidence. We are skeptical of experts and scholars. We’ve become too lazy to fact-check, too isolated to understand the broader context. We hold our own intellect highly, forgetting that the best outcomes result from cross-collaboration and peer review.
Facts have steadily been getting edged out by belief bias and cognitive dissonance and conspiracy theories and Instagram filters. So for those who have forgotten what a fact is, here’s a fact-checked refresher:
Getting vaccinated is our best chance of overcoming COVID-19.
In fact, they will have undergone the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history.
Herd immunity can only be reached if enough people are willing to get vaccinated.
Facts vex us. Challenge us. And, most of all, elude us. At night, we still peer into our skies. Though they are a little less dark than before (because of our greater knowledge and all the McDonald’s signs) we cannot see all the facts. Not yet.
But right here and right now, 200,000 years after we emerged from caves, filled with reason and wonder, there are enough of them to help us be better, more responsible humans.
Periodt.
