NASA Hubble Ultra Deep Field and NASA

• Main Author: Charles H. Lineweaver
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Hubble; Sperm whale
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.156.6886; http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/chapter%2016v3.pdf

Here we sit on a ball of silicate with beating hearts, opposable thumbs and curious minds. How did we get here? How did the evolution of non-living things, such as galaxies, stars and planets, create the ingredients and the conditions for the emergence of life? Which aspects of this evolution are unique to the Earth and which are common in the universe? Are we alone? These cosmobiological questions are sharpened and partially answered by the overview presented here. How in the universe did we get here? In the fictional story “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”, the Improbability Drive called into existence a sperm whale several miles above the surface of an alien planet (Adams, 1999). As it falls through the atmosphere: “this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale anymore … Ah….! Figure 1: How did we get here? This deep image of a tiny fraction of the sky ( ~ 10-7) shows ~ 10 4 of the ~10 11 galaxies in the observable universe. The square insert is a detail from one of the galaxies, showing an aerobic bipedal encephalated mammal on a moon, breathing oxygen imported from the blue planet in the background. We find ourselves on that blue planet 13.7 billion years after the big bang, falling at ~400 kilometers per second through an almost empty and possibly infinite universe. How in the universe did we get to be in such an unlikely situation? Images: