Why do we exist?

We humans are interesting creatures. Unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, we wonder about why we are here and where we are going. Some of us don't believe that we actually exist. Some think we're just part of someone's imagination or dream, or even that we're in a Matrix, created either by humans in the future or more advanced aliens. Is what we perceive as reality actually there or is it just a figment of imagination? Both could be true, but for the most part, we accept that reality is real.

If we are real, then why are we here? Why do we exist? There are many answers to that fundamental question.

Religion tells us that we exist because God created us to love Him and eventually return to Him. The problem with this is that we don't really understand the mind of God. We have no idea why He would create us. He doesn't need us. All we do know is that we need Him.

Why did God create us as flawed creatures? Unlike God who can do no evil, we can be evil. God is by definition good and incapable of evil. That's why He's perfect and we're imperfect. Why do we have to go through this trial period on Earth to find out if we're worthy to be with God? It's not a fair system because for some it's easier. Or, maybe this is the test to see if we are worthy. We are put through tribulations to see what we're made of, whether we have the mettle to be with God. It's easy to see why there are so many different religions and concepts about God's plan for us. But, we really don't know what God is like. All we have are clues from his prophets and from Jesus, but even their insights can be confusing. All we know is that we need God if we're ever going to escape this life to be with Him forever. Religion is only a service to get us there. Religion provides us with a means to worship God and behave ourselves. God doesn't need our worship. We need worship to remind us that we need God. We can't influence God by what we do. All we can do is screw ourselves up. It's up to us to do what God has told us to do, which is live in peace and love. That's one thing that we do know about God, that He likes peace and love. Religion is supposed to help us understand that.

Science on the other hand, has plotted out the reason we exist in exquisite detail. They call it evolution, and it's been going on ever since the Big Bang. By evolution, I mean all of the events that have shaped the universe and us, not just Darwinian evolution, which has only happened in the last four billion years, and as far as we Homo sapiens are concerned only about a few million years. Actually we Homo sapiens have only been around in our present form for around two hundred thousand years. The universe has been around almost 14 billion years, so we're literally newbies.

If you consider all of the events that had to occur for us to exist, it's mind-boggling. Since the Big Bang cooled quickly to condense energy into matter and antimatter, it's amazing that the universe progressed to form the kind of matter that makes us up. Matter and antimatter annihilate each other, but there was just a tiny fraction more matter and it persisted to make what we see today. Then, gravity, which just happens to be weaker than the other three forces of nature (electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear) slowly attracted matter in the form of hydrogen gas to clump into masses that eventually compressed down enough to cause nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. This process was aided by magnetism, a force that is needed for stars to form. This combined gravity and magnetism allowed the creation of massive stars that only lived for a short time (ten to a hundred thousand years) before going supernova and producing the higher chemical elements that are needed to make planets and us. Dark matter also helped in this process and eventually caused some massive stars to end up as black holes that began to attract other stars into galaxies. Galaxies allowed the formation of dwarf stars like our sun that stayed on the main sequence to burn hydrogen and remain stable enough to form planets. Massive stars don't last long enough to do this.

Planet formation is a common process. When supernovae spread gas and dust containing all of the elements into space, the nebulas that results eventually become new star nurseries. The stars that form in them have large gas and dust rings orbiting around them, and that's what forms planets just what happened around our proto-sun over 4.7 billion years ago.

Now, in order to have life, one must have water. Well, it turns out that hydrogen and oxygen are the most abundant elements in the universe and when combined they form water, lots of water. When a new star becomes hot enough to support fusion because of gravity compression, it ignites and blasts the ice that orbits it out away from it. This ice dam or snow line is far enough away so that the star's heat doesn't vaporize the water. This ring of ice chunks and particles is what forms the cores of gas giants, which attract hydrogen and helium gas. Jupiter formed like this and because of the dust and debris in the accretion (stuff clumping together) disc that it formed in, slowed because of drag and moved closer to the new sun. This dragged ice into the inner solar system and this is what collided with the Earth during the late bombardment period (about 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago). This is where our oceans came from. The idea that the oceans came from comets or asteroids later has been changed. It turns out that there are also massive amounts of water chemically bound and trapped in the Earth down some 300 miles under the surface. There is more water there than what's in all of the oceans. The bottom line is that we have water on the Earth and it was needed to form life or at least support it.

The Panspermia theory says that all of the inner rocky planets had water at one time (think billions of years). Mercury is too close to the sun and too small to support an atmosphere, which is needed for surface water. Venus had water but it was still too close to the sun and the water boiled up into the atmosphere. Water is a good green house gas, and now Venus is hotter than you know where. Mars also had atmosphere and surface water but it cooled too quickly and its core stopped rotating and because of that it had no magnetosphere to protect it from the solar wind, which eventually ablated its atmosphere off into space. However, a meteor crashed into Mars before this happened and sent life that formed there to the Earth. So, that theory says that we're Martians. That, in a nutshell, is why we are here, or so that theory goes. However there are difficulties with the idea of how life started. I'll discuss this in the next part.

Thanks for reading.