The Universe Story: Continuing Creation

"I am so enthralled by the Universe that I think IT is the Great Mystery itself. I don't need anything outside of it. The hydrogen atoms in your body and mine were made shortly after the beginning of our Universe's Time. When we drink a glass of water we make an actual communion with our beginnings. I think that is awesome, much more awesome that the idea of magical transubstantiation." - Bill Bruel

"Some have asked me what understanding of Nature one shapes from so strange a year [in the sand dunes of Cape Cod]. I would answer that one's first appreciation is a sense that the creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active today as they have ever been, and that to-morrows morning will be as heroic as any of the world. Creation is here and now (ital. au.)." - Henry Beston, ["The Outermost House"]

Every individual needs and has a story about how "I" am related or connected to everyone and everything else, whether the story is stated overtly or just understood internally. Each human culture provides such a creation story, myth, or cosmology that explains how Earth came into existence and how living beings were created on it. The story explains the Sun and the night sky, including the Moon, planets, and stars. It explains land and water, plants, animals, and people. Each religion bases its ethical teachings, its teachings about correct behavior, on its creation story. So-called "Western civilization" has used the same, essentially unchanged, creation story for many centuries. It is the 2,500 year old story told in the Book of Genesis in the Bible.

David Korten, in "The Great Turning" [p. 250] describes Thomas Berry's view that the Black Death of the 14th century, which killed perhaps half of the population of Europe, split the story into two cosmologies, a spiritual story and a secular story. The spiritual story of religion focused on transcending nature, on the next world or the after-life, and on obedience to "God". The secular story focused on learning to control and dominate nature. Both separated humanity from nature, placing humans just below God and above all other living and non-living beings. The religious story of obedience (in order to attain the good afterlife) led to obedience to husband, to males, to government, to race, and to religion, producing wealth and power as earthly reward and heaven as final reward. The secular story evolved into materialism and mechanistic science. The secular story sipports the social Darwinism described in the Ecojustice chapter. No other stories are preached in our culture; and our present cosmology does not view Earth and the Universe as sacred.

Flaws began to show up in the Western creation story when Kepler and Copernicus showed that Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun rather than around Earth. Galileo discovered satellites around Jupiter, and astronomical knowledge has proceeded apace since then. Fraunhofer discovered absorption lines in the spectrum of the Sun, and later scientists showed that each chemical element absorbs and emits light at very specific wavelengths or colors. Fizeau used the Doppler effect to explain apparent differences in wavelength of these spectral "lines" in light from different stars. (The Doppler effect states that wavelengths are increased or stretched when the source is moving away from us and decreased or "squished" when the source is approaching us, just like sound from a passing siren.) Scientists found that some stars are moving toward us and some are moving away from us. About 100 years ago, Edwin Hubble found that virtually ALL the fuzzy "nebulae" that Harlow Shapley later showed were whole galaxies, are moving AWAY from us, and the farther away they are, the faster they are moving away! Their spectral lines are all shifted toward the red end of the spectrum; this is called "red-shift". Not only was our own Sun just an ordinary star in the "suburbs" of our own Milky Way galaxy, but the Milky Way was just one of many similar galaxies.

The first big space telescope, named after Edwin Hubble, has taken many dramatic pictures of our Universe and the many kinds of stars and galaxies that inhabit it. You can wonder over these on the HubbleSite or the Hubble Information Center. The most amazing picture is the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field. (If you have broadband be sure to download the Publication JPEG file of this.) About 10,000 galaxies can be counted in this image; they come in a bewildering array of shapes and sizes and ages and distances. Yet this image covers only as much of the sky as can be seen looking through an eight foot long soda straw; it would take 7,500,000 such images to cover the whole sky! The bottom line is that there are BILLIONS (thousand million) of galaxies in the Universe, and each galaxy contains BILLIONS of stars.

What we know about these stars and galaxies does not derive just from a few pictures from expensive telescopes. Human science over the last few centuries has produced an immense, extremely complicated, and highly interlocking collection of facts and rules that generalize on those facts. Some of the rules are remarkably simple:

• Newton's Law of Gravity: F = g m₁ m₂ / r²
• Maxwell's Equations of electromagnetism: D E = r / e₀;  D B = 0;  D X E = -dB/dt;  D X B = J + dE/Dt
• Einstein's mass-energy relation: E = m c²

Since the nineteenth century works of William Smith on stratigraphy and fossils, Louis Agassiz on continental glaciation, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace on evolution of species, and Gregor Mendel on genetics, the history of Earth and its life has been completely rewritten. Here again, science consists of an immense, extremely complicated, and highly interlocking collection of facts and generalizing rules. Molecular genetics, which tinkers with DNA, the very code of life, validates the same rules of physics, chemistry, and biology that also underlie the new history of the Universe and of Earth.

So what do we do now with our so recently shattered creation story? We have begun telling a new story, based on the discoveries of science. It is variously called The Universe Story, the New Creation Myth, The New Story, the New Cosmology, the Great Story, or the Epic of Evolution. The Universe Story starts almost 14 billion years ago with the Big Bang, when our universe created itself. The story moves through the combining of protons, neutrons, and electrons into hydrogen, helium, and a little lithium in the first moments of the Universe. Then the primordial soup separates into clumps that create galaxies by the billions, and billions of stars in each galaxy. The Story then focuses on the creation of our solar system and Earth about five billion years ago. It continues with the beginning of life on Earth and the development of species by evolution. Humans appear quite recently and only in the past few thousand years begin to take over Earth and its systems.

The amazing thing about this new creation story is that it is both awe-inspiring and true. This new story for the coming Ecozoic Era, which will occur after the success of Ecoshift, tells that humans ARE Earth, that humans ARE the Universe. Each of us is a unique component of the evolutionary creation that continues through us. We are the Universe become conscious of itself. We are made of stardust and ALL our ancestors were successful. We are born from and return to the natural world.

Development of this new and ecocentric creation myth has been led by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry. Their book "The Universe Story", first introduced my favorite name for the story and remains the classic work. Swimme's web site includes a magazine interview, his classic 12-hour video "Canticle to the Cosmos", its short 80-minute version "The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos", and audio tapes by Thomas Berry. Jennifer Morgan has written and Dana Lynne Andersen marvelously illustrated a series of three books that tell the Universe Story for children: "Born With a Bang", "From Lava to Life" , and "Mammals Who Morph". I've given these to my young grandchildren, who love them.

In the late 1990s, the Epic of Evolution Society helped to spread the story and discuss its details, particularly how to make a "story" out of the science. The Society and a related "Cosmogen" listserve apparently no longer exist. Similarly, a study guide called "An Amazing Journey! The Universe and Me", based on the study group model of the Northwest Earth Institute, is difficult to find on the web and may be out of print.

Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd are making a life work of spreading the Universe Story. They travel the country, living out of a van which is their only home, talking and preaching the Story (Dowd is a minister). For more of the story online, read Connie Barlow's "The Way of Science and the Epic of Evolution" and Michael Dowd's "The Big Picture" on their Great Story web site. This site has lots of readings, talks, and links. Cathy Russell is developing an Epic of Evolution web site with many links, activities, and celebration rituals. More rituals that tell the story can be found on the Deep Ecology page of the Rainforest Information Center, led by John Seed and Ruth Rosenhek.

Books about the history and future of the Universe abound these days, especially books about the formation of the Universe in the Big Bang. The husband and wife team of astronomer Joel R. Primack and lawyer-singer Nancy Ellen Abrams wrote "The View From the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos", which combines scientific knowledge with the apparent uniqueness of humanity in order to express that Earth, and each of us living on it, exists at the center of time and space. This book combines the Universe Story with many other aspects of Ecoshift. Other similar books include Connie Barlow's "Evolution Extended", Paul Brockleman's "Cosmology and Creation", Fritjof Capra's "The Web of Life", and E. O. Wilson's "The Diversity of Life".

Creation of the Universe

The nearest star to our Sun is Alpha Centauri, the fourth brightest star in our sky and 4.4 light years away. Actually this is a system of three stars that orbit each other, two sun-sized and one a dwarf, Proxima Centauri, that is now closest to us. Sirius, the brightest star in our sky, is 8.6 light years away. When we move as far away as Vega, only 25 light years, "our" constellations become almost totally unrecognizable because of three-dimensional space. The sky we see, the constellations we name, and the stories we tell about them are unique to our star and Earth, its living planet. All the stars we see with our naked eyes, about 2000 on a dark night far from light pollution, are still very close to us with respect to the 100,000 light year diameter of our Milky Way Galaxy, whose extremely flattened disk we see as a misty brightness across the sky. Our galaxy probably contains 200 billion stars. Only a small fraction of these have been photographed by telescopes; the rest are hidden by lots of dark dust.

The farthest away we can see with our naked eyes is much farther than any stars in the Milky Way. It is a fuzzy spot in the constellation Andromeda that is called the Andromeda Galaxy. This galaxy is about the same size as our Milky Way and is very close to us as galaxies go at 2.5 million light years. To get a real feel for our place in the Cosmos, find the Andromeda Galaxy, either from a star chart or by someone else pointing it out, and ponder on this fact: if you were there in the Andromeda Galaxy, looking at the Milky Way, it would look just the way the Andromeda Galaxy looks to you. Then think that you are not only looking through 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles but back in time 2,500,000 years. The Magellanic Clouds, too far south for me to see from home, are smaller galaxies that are closer to us. All these galaxies are part of the "local group" that interacts gravitationally. The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are pulling each other closer (Andromeda is one of just a few blue-shifted galaxies) and will merge in about 2.5 billion years. Binoculars and small telescopes increase greatly what our eyes can see. With my 8-inch reflector telescope at 100x I can see a group of galaxies in the constellation of Virgo that are 60 million light years away.

The red-shift of galaxies has turned out not to be the classic Doppler effect, but a "cosmological red-shift" caused by the expansion of space itself. Realization that the Universe itself is expanding slowly overcame adherence by human scientists, let alone the rest of humanity, to the concept that the Universe must be eternal. Knowing the locations of galaxies and the speed at which they are retreating from each other, we can calculate backwards in time and show that exactly 13.7 billion years ago ALL the galaxies in the Universe were at a single point. The Universe was created and started expanding at that point and time. Astronomer Fred Hoyle was so disgusted with this concept that he sarcastically named this moment of creation "The Big Bang". In spite of many efforts to come up with a different name, like Swimme and Berry's "Great Flaring Forth" or "The Great Radiance" of Philemon Sturges, the name has stuck, even though a loud sound is an irrelevant concept for the occasion.

The occasion of the Big Bang brought into existence all the laws of physics and chemistry that we know, and they have not changed since then. What produced the Big Bang, and how, remain questions for metaphysics or religion. Some cosmologists favor a mathematical concept called string theory, which requires ten-dimensional space and leads to a conclusion that there may be an infinity of universes popping in and out of existence, each having different laws of physics. One example of the various books on this subject is Leonard Susskind's "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design".

In the unimaginably short time of 10^-37 seconds, the Universe sprang into being. Over the so-called "inflation phase" of the next 10^-32 sec it expanded incredibly rapidly and was unbelievably hot and dense with electrons, neutrinos, and quarks of matter and anti-matter winking in and out of existence. By one second the temperature had cooled enough for quarks to combine into protons and neutrons. Particles of matter and anti-matter recombined until all the anti-matter was gone, leaving the slight excess of matter for the later Universe. Randomness at this time created minute variations in density, which ultimately allowed condensation by gravity into stars and galaxies. After three minutes single protons (hydrogen) and neutrons started to combine into deuterium (proton plus neutron) and helium (two protons and two neutrons) nuclei, within a cloud of electrons. The Universe soon consisted of 76% hydrogen nuclei and 24% helium nuclei. All the hydrogen atoms in your body were created in the early minutes of the Universe and have been recycling through stars and through life on Earth since then.

This normal matter of atoms of elements, which includes all the stars and galaxies we see, comprises only 4.6% of the total mass/energy of the Universe. Another 23% is "dark matter", whose make-up is not yet known, but may be high-energy neutrinos. The remaining 72% is the even more mysterious dark energy, which appears to be an inherent property of space-time because its density (its quantity per unit volume) remains constant even as space expands.

After 400,000 years of cooling, the energy of electrons became low enough that they combined with hydrogen and helium nuclei into whole atoms. This creation of electrically neutral particles from the former positive nuclei and negative electrons caused the Universe to become transparent. Light began traveling without being quickly reabsorbed. In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson used a radio telescope to detect this "light", which is called the cosmic microwave background radiation. It is red-shifted so much that it appears to come from an object with a temperature of only 3.4ºK (degrees above absolute zero), just as predicted earlier by cosmologists studying the physics of the Big Bang.

The slightly uneven spatial distribution of the background radiation reflects the early density variations of the Universe. Over the next billion years gravity, acting on these density variations, magnified them, creating clumping of hydrogen and helium into stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. No more galaxies have been created since, though gravity does sometimes pull them together so that they interact.

The first-generation stars consisted of hydrogen and helium in the same ratio as the early Universe. Stars are huge furnaces of nuclear fusion. Unless they are very small, gravity pulls hydrogen together under so much pressure that hydrogen nuclei fuse into helium, just as in the primordial Universe. Helium and hydrogen nuclei also fuse to create lithium, two helium atoms combine to make beryllium, and addition of another proton makes boron. A separate process inside hot stars creates carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen; other processes can then make still heavier atoms up through iron. As stars burn up their hydrogen fuel, they do various things depending on their size, including collapsing, expanding, and even exploding as a nova. During this dying, they blow off into space some of the various elements they have produced. The space dust and gas from first generation stars can re-accumulate by gravity and be pulled into second generation stars that are richer in heavier elements. These in turn can also die. When a massive, cool star has burned all its light elements so that mostly iron is left, it collapses rapidly by gravity and then explodes as a supernova. Such an explosion creates all the elements heavier than iron and distributes them into space. All the burning of all the stars since the birth of the Universe has transformed some of the hydrogen into helium and all other elements, so the current normal matter of the Universe is now 70% hydrogen, 28% helium, 2% all other elements.

The variety of kinds of stars, of different sizes, masses, ages, and elemental content bewilders the mind and keeps astronomers busy learning about the amazing contents of the Universe: brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, variable stars, red giants, black holes, novae and super-novae of different types, pulsars, quasars, and on and on. Some of the bright stars that form the famous constellation of Orion are only a few million years old. Then there are the remains of exploded stars like planetary nebulae and the star-forming Orion Nebula, which you can see with your naked eye glowing in Orion's sword. When we look closely at the Orion Nebula, we can see hundreds of stars being born from "pillars" of dust.

The Universe Story tells the myth of Tiamat, the name Swimme and Berry give to a supernova in our part of the galaxy 5 billion years ago. Tiamat (and probably a few other explosions too) has provided us with all the elements that we find on Earth. It is not far-fetched to say that we are all born from the stardust of Tiamat. By half a billion years after Tiamat exploded, some of its "ashes" had grouped together into the star and the planets that are our Solar System.

Only within the past ten years have astronomers found ways and built instruments capable of detecting the effects of planets orbiting around other stars. Now we know of several hundred planets outside our own system, including some multi-planet systems. So far all these planets are larger than Earth, more like Jupiter and Saturn, but the next few years should bring detection of Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits. Recent research suggests that nearly all stars have small planets.

Will we ever be able to travel to such planets? Although we have been to our Moon, it is only one light-second away, and the cost of going there has prevented further visits now for 35 years. We have only contemplated the possibility of traveling the mere 8 or so light minutes to Mars or Venus. Back in the science fiction era of the 50s and 60s, some people seriously proposed populating these planets in order to reduce overpopulation on Earth. But we never thought about how many spaceships a year it would take to do this or the amount of energy required for transport and "terraforming" to make them habitable. We have sent only four spacecraft to the far reaches of the Solar System. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now 13 light hours away, three times as far as Neptune. At this rate it would take 3000 years to reach the nearest star! Humanity apparently is irrevocably bound to our own solar system for the foreseeable future.

The story of the Universe continues through time. By comparing our Sun's evolution to that of other stars of similar mass and composition, we know that in another billion years our Sun will heat up enough that life on Earth cannot continue. By 7 billion years from now our Sun will expand into a red giant star, losing mass by emitting gas. Earth will probably survive because it will move away from the expanding but ever lighter sun. Soon after, the Sun will run out of its hydrogen fuel, shed its outer parts into nebulous gases, and shrink into a white dwarf star made mostly of helium.

Although looking into the future of the whole Universe is somewhat more questionable, there evidently are good reasons to expect that in another 100 billion years the Universe will have expanded so much that all galaxies will be invisible to each other. By 100 trillion years the last stars will have burned out and the whole Universe will be dark. In an almost unimaginable length of time thereafter, about 10⁵⁰ years, nothing will be left but black holes that will then evaporate over the next 10¹⁰⁰ years and our Universe will cease to exist.

Contemplating the whole story of the Universe can make me feel both extremely humble and extremely grateful. Humble because of its immensity and the apparent irrelevance to the Universe as a whole about what happens here on Earth. Gratefulness because what happens here on Earth really doesn't matter much to the history of the Universe. The Universe will continue evolving regardless of Earth. Perhaps in some other planet system experiments in creation and evolution will produce thinking life forms that do a far better job than humanity in taking care of their own beings, of beings of other kinds, and of their planet itself.

Creation of Life

By measuring the radioactive decay of uranium atoms in primitive meteorites, we now know that the solar system formed quite quickly by condensation of gas into fine dust 4.567 billion years ago (Bya), to an accuracy of within 2 million years. Over the next million years, the dust condensed into larger aggregates that became the sun, the planets, asteroids, comets, and meteors. The next 10 to 100 million years saw much less frequent collisions, but a massive one about 4.2 Bya, with an asteroid or small planet sometimes called Theia, ejected the Moon from Earth. The collision probably caused the 23.5º tilt in the Earth's axis (with respect to the plane of the solar system) thus giving us the seasons of the year. At this time Earth was separating its heavy iron core from its lighter silica-based crust, and the first rocks were forming.

By 4.0 to 3.5 Bya , though still wracked with volcanic and tectonic activity, Earth had cooled to 60-70ºC, allowing water to condense into oceans and for the first bacterial life to create itself. Swimme and Berry give the mythic name Aries to this first living prokaryote, a single cell with DNA and cell walls but no cell nucleus. Atmospheric carbon dioxide was relatively abundant in those days, and about 3 billion years ago blue-green algae (Cyanobacteria) learned how to use solar energy to combine carbon dioxide with water to make carbohydrates for food. They had invented photosynthesis, the process that all nature uses today as its primary energy source, and which humanity with all its science has not come close to artificially duplicating.

Photosynthesis had one really bad side effect. It produced a toxic substance as a waste product. That toxin accumulated and accumulated and accumulated in the atmosphere until it created a major survival crisis. Ultimately some organisms learned how to absorb this toxin and combine it with carbohydrates to get energy. The process is called respiration and the toxic substance was oxygen!

It took another billion years for living cells to confine their DNA to a cell nucleus and become eukaryotes. By 2 Bya this allowed multi-cellular organisms and sexual reproduction. All this wonderful development was further aided by symbiosis as certain forms of bacteria became synergistically incorporated into larger cells as mitochondria, where respiration happens, and as chloroplasts, where photosynthesis happens in plants. These built-in bacteria are still with plants and animals today, reproducing independently of DNA and sex, and maintaining life by carrying out the two basic processes of photosynthesis in plants and respiration in all plants and animals, including each of us.

By 1.5 Bya, the basic chemical processes of life had all been invented. Evolution changed from development of functions to development of forms. The next billion years saw the creation of multi-cellular organisms, with differentiated cells and complex body structure: fungi, worms, plants, arthropods, and at 500 million years ago (Mya), the first vertebrates. Plants and animals finally moved out of the seas onto land.

For the most recent 500 million years of Earth history, the geologic record is complete enough that we can evaluate quantitatively the variety of forms of life, of species. The record shows at least five times in that period in which over 50% of all animal species died. The first great extinction occurred about 440 Mya at the end of the Ordovician period and was followed by rapid development of higher plants and insects. The second extinction at 360 Mya at the end of the Devonian triggered development of reptiles and amphibians. The third at the end of the Permian and the beginning of the Mesozoic era 250 Mya apparently allowed the rise of the dinosaurs to their lengthy time as the dominant form of land animal. By this time plate tectonics had smashed all the earlier continents into one supercontinent, called Pangaea. The fourth extinction at the end of the Triassic period about 200 Mya allowed development of birds and mammals, and by 150 Mya flowering plants or angiosperms. The famous fifth mass extinction at 65 Mya ended the Mesozoic Era, killed off the dinosaurs, and allowed mammals to inherit the Earth. Based on a worldwide layer of iridium-containing dust around the world, we know that this extinction was caused by an asteroid impact on the Yucatan coast, which created the Chicxulub crater and lots and lots of atmospheric dust. It now seems that each of the previous major extinctions was also connected to large meteor impacts. Continuing creation on Earth seems to require external force to really keep it going.

The history of mammals is the history of the past 65 million years. Although Earth has been beset by climate change and ice ages for much of its history, it is the most recent ice age, the Pleistocene of the past 2.5 million years, with which we humans are intimately connected. The first humans, the first of genus Homo, evolved from Pithecine apes only about 2 Mya. Anthropology has a lot of fun ascribing various skeletal parts to various Pithecine and Homo species, but in some ways it really doesn't matter very much exactly what species developed into what other species and what species died off without reproducing. Earlier Homo species evidently developed use of fire, and probably of language. (This depends on how language is defined. Many other species may have languages; dolphins, whales, crows, and blue jays have wide ranges of expressions that carry meaning. Just because we don't understand them doesn't mean they don't have a language.) By 200,000 years ago individuals we now recognize as our own species, Homo sapiens, were roaming central Africa and ultimately spreading around the world. By 10,000 years ago the last ice age (so far) ended, agriculture and cities developed, and the problems of humanity versus Earth began. The history of humanity over the past 10,000 years has been told many, many times. Swimme and Berry tell it in "The Universe Story", Korten tells it in "The Great Turning", Eisler tells it in "The Chalice and the Blade". I will not retell it here.

The Twelve Miracles of Creation

1. In the beginning the Universe burst into existence, instantly complete with the right set of physical laws to allow it to grow to magnificence.
2. In just a few seconds most of its original matter and anti-matter annihilated each other, leaving only the tiny excess of hydrogen and helium matter to continue.
3. Hydrogen fusing to helium, after gravity pulled the matter into stars, lighted up the Universe and the Sun that energizes our Earth.
4. Once an old star called Tiamat blew up into a supernova, creating all the heavier elements needed for our solar system, for life, and for our bodies.
5. The formation of Earth allowed the combination of oxygen atoms with hydrogen atoms to make water, so rare in the Universe, but so fundamental to life.
6. Earth was made of just the right elements at just the right distance from the Sun to allow renewal of the land surface by plate tectonics and retention of water in vast oceans.
7. Molecules of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in these oceans learned to combine and to reproduce themselves and became Aries, the first living cell.
8. Later Promethio created photosynthesis, combining carbon dioxide and water to make food and poisonous oxygen.
9. In order to live on an Earth polluted by oxygen, an organism called Prospero invented respiration, combining carbon molecules with oxygen to obtain energy.
10. The development of plants and animals began when Sappho learned to split and merge its DNA by sexual reproduction.
11. Many millennia later, a chance collision with an asteroid destroyed the dinosaurs who ruled Earth, and exposed the creative power of mammals.
12. Then, a mere moment of time ago, Homo sapiens developed at an amazing rate and became the first species to contemplate its place in the universe.

The Anthropic Principle

The Anthropic Principle states that if the Universe did not have exactly the right values of these constants to have produced intelligent life on Earth, WE WOULD NOT BE HERE TO MEASURE THEM. The Universe could have annihilated itself or re-collapsed. It could have expanded so fast it burned out rapidly. Atoms could never have formed or formed of vastly different elements. Gravity could have been too strong or the electromagnetic force too weak. In other words, a great many things could have gone wrong, but didn't. What this means for interpretation of the birth of the Universe has been hotly debated. For physicists, there is still hope of an as yet unknown theory of everything that will explain why the values have to be what they are. For mathematicians, it suggests hypotheses of continuous creation of an infinite number of universes, each with different laws and constants, most of which quickly disappear. For fundamental religionists it suggests intelligent design by an external force or being. As for me, I am content to recognize the Big Bang and its consequences as very likely a forever unexplainable occurrence, which therefore commands my wonder, awe, and respect.

The Gaia Hypothesis

James Lovelock forcefully argued that Earth acted as if it were a single living organism in his 1979 book "Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth". He named this apparent organism after the Greek Earth goddess, Gaia, a suggestion first made by William Golding. In Lovelock's sense, Gaia encompasses the negative and thus stabilizing feedbacks between Earth's life and its global environment. David Schwartzmann remarked that Gaia is the metabolism of the biosphere. Together with microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock has pointed out the importance of microbes in creating homeostasis. Earth was homeostatic when there were only single-celled organisms; they created the conditions for multi-cellular life. Single-celled organisms invented photosynthesis, respiration, fermentation, nitrogen fixation, even DNA and genetics. Because chloroplasts in plants and mitochondria in plants and animals are just incorporated bacteria, bacteria still produce most of the chemical transformations that create homeostasis. Our own dry weight is 10% bacteria, without which we would die.

The Gaia Hypothesis has generated a great deal of controversy. Some of this resulted from taking the "living organism" concept too literally. Some has been based on details of biosphere science and on debate about the physical conditions of early Earth. Some has stated that the concept is overly reductionist by concentrating on physics, chemistry, and microbiology to the exclusion of multi-celled life. The Gaia hypothesis says nothing about the development of animals and plants in all their fantastic variety of form and behavior, and thus has been called spiritually bereft. On the other hand, Gaia invites thinking of "the living Earth", which, for me at least, equates to "the living God" so much needed by humanity.

Gaia as a living organism may not necessarily be a scientific fact, though this has been vigorously argued, but the concept is a unifying story of explanation, and thus a myth of a holistic, evolutionary Earth. Our Earth is finely-tuned for life and that tuning was initiated, if not necessarily continued, by single-celled organisms. We humans had nothing to do with this tuning, but we have developed the power to destroy it. One can argue whether humanity has the capability to destroy ALL life on Earth, or if the microbes will survive, but it really doesn't matter.

Lessons From The Story

Randomness and Predictability

The Universe did effectively start off with very small variations in density that have since developed over many orders of magnitude to become all the great variety of the Universe today. But even if we knew exactly the original location and velocity of every quark, we could not PREDICT the current Universe without having a quark-based computer as big as the Universe and running it for as long as the age of the Universe. In other words, it would take a second identical Universe to predict the present one. This makes a mockery of the word "predictability". Another argument , which borders on pseudo-science, extends the quantum Uncertainty Principle of physics to claim unpredictability at all space scales. The reality of predictability or unpredictability in the Universe, as in so much else in ECOSHIFT, lies along a continuum, not in the extremes. We can use the laws of science to make general statements about the behavior of the whole Universe, or specific statements about the behavior of specific parts, but we cannot make specific statements about the whole Universe. There is partial predictability, and partial unpredictability.

Then what role does randomness or chance play? One answer involves a description of "chaos" in its scientific/mathematical sense. Chaos or chaotic behavior occurs when a completely predictable, or deterministic, process gives apparently unpredictable or random results. For me this is best expressed by the simple iterative "logistic map" equation: x_n+1 = r x_n (1 - x_n) , where r is a constant. The equation is used repeatedly, each time replacing the x_n value with the value of x_n+1 to get a new x_n+1. For any initial x between 0 and 1 and r between 3.57 and 4.00 this simple equation exhibits unpredictable chaotic behavior in successive x values. The results do not repeat in any pattern. You can test this with a simple spreadsheet. Other expressions of chaos are when a very small change in initial conditions makes a huge difference at a later time (the classic case is the concept that a butterfly can generate a hurricane), and the threshold effect (such as walking off a cliff). A major threshold effect may occur if global warming suddenly causes the Gulf Stream to shut down. Natural systems are inherently so complicated that we can never understand them completely, thus chaotic, butterfly, and threshold effects may be effectively unpredictable even though true randomness is not involved.

Reductionism and Holism

In the past several decades, science has been forced to recognize that the whole often IS greater than the sum of its parts. In order to go further in understanding how things work, we needed to put the pieces back together and look at the whole body or the whole ecosystem. We needed to be holistic, not reductionist. We needed to recognize the existence of "emergent" properties, that is, behavior that only occurs above a given space scale. For instance, the concept of "ice" has no meaning at the scale of single molecules. Language and thought only arise at higher levels of organization of living cells. Life itself is an emergent property that is not explained by fundamental laws and properties of physics and chemistry. Holism and emergence combine with chaos, butterfly, and threshold effects to tell us that we can never hope to explain and quantify everything. There must be limits to our knowledge and our capabilities, and we must recognize these limits lest we remain insolent with respect to nature and Earth.

Science has been criticized for the lack of spirituality inherent in reductionism and for lack of conscience/consciousness. Some of this criticism arises from failure to differentiate science from scientists. Science tries to be objectively concerned with knowledge about how things work. Scientists have often expressed ethical concerns about whether things ought to be allowed to work. The highly influential Union of Concerned Scientists formed in 1969 with the goal of shifting federal research from military technology to environmental and social problems. Scientists have raised political awareness of the adverse effects of pollution, acid rain, and ozone destruction. In 1990, 32 famous scientists felt compelled to send "An Open Letter to the Religious Community" calling attention to human destruction of Creation and urging religious leaders to get involved.

Linearity, Cycles, and the Continuity of Life

Life does not begin anew in each individual organism; it continues. In asexual reproduction new organisms are created by simple cell division. In sexual reproduction, new organisms grow from two living parent cells that merge themselves and their DNA. Since the very first living cells were formed, no new life has been created; it is just one life continually passing on by division of living cells. As far as we know, new life has not been created from non-living matter for 4 billion years. Although the life of a sexual organism always ends in death, there is no creation of new organisms from death. New organisms always arise from the passing on of life from their parents. ALL of the ancestors of each of us were magnificent in successfully passing their life on to us. The metaphor of the "tree of life" connotes the continued passing of life from one source through an increasing number of branches that grow longer and more complex.

However, we also need to acknowledge and honor that most twigs and branches of the tree have died and that most individuals of species from asexual microbes to Sequoias DIE BEFORE THEY CAN REPRODUCE. Each living organism is capable of producing dozens to millions of offspring. But whenever organisms produce an average of more than one reproductive offspring, the population of that kind of organism grows and eventually MUST exceed (overshoot) the resources that its ecosystem can supply. Overshoot results in a rapid decline in population, usually followed by recovery and ultimately another overshoot. If recovery from decline fails because reproductive rate remains below an average of one reproducing offspring per parent, the population eventually becomes extinct. Only with an average of exactly one reproducing child per parent can a stable population be indefinitely maintained. The implications for the Population chapter are obvious

As the Universe Story tells, our basic life processes are shared with all life forms and were originally created by single-celled organisms. Many of the genes in our DNA we have in common with those organisms. Many more genes encode for characteristics of vertebrates: bones, skull, arms, and legs. When we get as closely related as we are to chimpanzees, 98.6% of our DNA matches theirs. This is such a small difference that scientists can argue there really is no difference between genus Pan and genus Homo; the separation may be more anthropocentric than scientific.

The Story also tells of the wonders of evolutionary similarities and differences. Convergent evolution describes organs that have developed more than once in the Story. Wings developed independently in insects, birds, and mammals; obviously flying has important advantages. Eyes have developed independently at least 40 times and in a bewildering variety; seeing clearly is an advantage (pun intended)! On the other hand, many species have developed senses that humans, with all our hubris, lack: whales sense low frequency sound waves, bats sense high frequency sound waves; birds sense Earth's geomagnetic field, bees have ultraviolet vision, pit vipers and insects sense heat, and plants and insects have superbly discerning chemical sensors. These are all our relatives; somewhere back there we have common ancestors. And they are all wonderful.

"There is a tension in my attraction to the infinite.... I am the sky, I am the rock, I am the pine.... At the same time I exist in the limits of who I am, distinct from all other beings and forms of matter....The sense of unity with this rock, with these trees, speaks to me. These are my relations. ... But the unity is only part of the truth. The yearning for unity arises from the debilitating experience of fragmentation. The complementary pull is to relationality, to mutuality.... In and out, the dance of limits and limitlessness, the movement of unity and relationality." [Stephanie Kaza, "The Attentive Heart", p. 235-236.]

The Universe Story contains all other stories because all stories are part of the creation of the Universe. The Story teaches that diversity, variation, difference, change, and relationships are how the Universe operates. It teaches that death is no less sacred than life. In fact, death is REQUIRED to make room for new cycles of life. It teaches recycling at all scales, and that EVERY THING really is connected to everything else. It teaches that we are all related and have the same history, both animate and inanimate, living and dead, rapid- and slow-changing. In the words of Thomas Berry "The capacity for bonding of the components of the Universe with each other enables the vast variety of beings to come into existence in that gorgeous profusion that we observe about us." Connie Barlow adds: "The stream of stars blinking on, blinking off, and the living stream of organisms coming into existence, going out of existence, is beyond judgment of good and evil. It is, rather, magnificent. It is sublime, precious, and exceedingly worthy of reverence" ["Green Space, Green Time", p. 28].

The Sixth Extinction and the Future

On the other hand perhaps the sixth extinction, as the previous five, will provide new evolutionary opportunities. Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan point out that:

"From the paramecium to the human race, all life forms are meticulously organized, sophisticated aggregates of evolving microbial life. Far from leaving organisms behind on an evolutionary 'ladder', we are both surrounded by them and composed of them. Having survived in an unbroken line from the beginnings of life, all organisms today are equally evolved" ["The Microcosm", Wild Earth, Fall 2000, p. 12].

Even if species extinction were not happening, we humans need to consider how we are affecting the evolution of every other species on Earth, from elephants and whales to the smallest microorganisms. Is humanity so great that we deserve to skew evolution on Earth, which as far as we know is the only place in the Universe where life exists at all? The answer depends on one's belief about whether humanity is the pinnacle and purpose of Creation or of a Creator, or whether humanity will ultimately be superceded by creation of some other, hopefully more beneficent, species. This is the crux of the difference between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism.

The average length of time that any one species exists is roughly 2 million years, though a given genus can exist for much, much longer. Homo sapiens has only been around for 200,000 years, so we are still a young species. In many ways we are far younger than that. We have only learned the universal laws of physics and chemistry in the past 400 years, and have only seen Earth as a whole, from space, for a mere 40 years. Relative to the history of Creation on Earth, change is now happening unbelievably fast. Where do we think we and Earth are going, and what will Earth be like a mere thousand or million years from now? Duane Elgin, in "Awakening Earth" contemplates the possible futures of humanity, including its evolution into a new species.

So we can view the current situation either optimistically or pessimistically. Optimistically, now may be seen as the end of the Cenozoic Era and the beginning of an Ecozoic Era in which humanity learns to live within the confines of Earth's support systems. Or pessimistically, the sixth extinction could include humanity as well as many other life forms, in which case it will probably be quite a while before anyone cares what the new era is called!

The Conscious Universe

Although the Universe is an immense place, full of unbelievable variety of planets, stars, and galaxies, there is, as far as we know, only one place in the Universe where creative evolution has produced beings who can contemplate the Universe as a whole, with its fascinating and enigmatic history. That place is Earth and the beings are humans.

We have searched for signs of life elsewhere in our own solar system, most directly by landing spacecraft on Mars. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program has listened in some parts of the electromagnetic spectrum for signals from nearby stars that might indicate intelligent life. Our own electromagnetic signals have reached into space at the speed of light, but have not yet elicited any response. We have argued the probabilities that life has also arisen elsewhere in the Universe, but we have so far found nothing. Several decades ago, statistical arguments based on billions of stars in each of billions of galaxies suggested that life-forms are probably common in the Universe. I suspect, but no one knows, that the Universe harbors lots of other beings who also have the capability to reflect on their own universe stories. But more recently, the improbabilities of the Earth-based Miracles described above have been used to argue against an abundance of life. Another recent argument suggests that technological cultures such as ours burn up fossil carbon energy sources and disperse mineral elements so quickly that such a civilization, like ours, can exist only for a very, very brief period of time on any given planet. So just because we don't find artificial electromagnetic signals from nearby stars now, doesn't mean that planets around them did not go through our current phase in the past. In spite of the many reports of alien spacecraft, there is no hard evidence that any were real; in fact, the wide variety of such reports argues against interaction with any particular group of aliens. Earlier in this chapter I pointed out how slowly our own spacecraft are moving toward other stars and thus how unlikely we are to ever use interstellar space travel. What all this means is that for the foreseeable future, and maybe forever, life on Earth will not interact with life anywhere else in the Universe. That puts us in a unique position.

As far as we know, humans are the only life form that can contemplate the Universe. Primack and Abrams, in "The View from the Center of the Universe" put humanity at the center of Creation, both in space and time. Connie Barlow writes "For Wilson, ..., humankind is life become conscious of itself. For Huxley, humankind is evolution become conscious of itself. But for Berry, humankind is the universe become conscious of itself (ital. au.)" ["Green Space, Green Time", p. 53]. Humanity is the Universe becoming self-aware. Each of us is the consciousness of the Universe. Each of us plays an active role in Continuing Creation. What I do influences people and things around me and makes change. I am a creator! What ethical responsibilities do I therefore have? That is the subject of the remaining chapters.