GENESIS

Taking a look at all the stuff that went on before man evolved....

It wasn't a proper beginning.

Stuff had been around for billions of years. Mostly it was a light and pleasant gas men would call hydrogen when men came to be. It swirled in gigantic clouds, you couldn't even start to imagine their absolute hugeness. Sometimes it was pulled into something more substantial than a cloud and, when the pressures of its own weight got to be too much began exploding in ages-long nuclear conflagrations. Not something as feeble as a Hiroshima bomb, but something infinitely more glorious. It made the pop-squeak atomic tests of the cold war look like the feeblest of fire crackers.

But that wasn't the proper beginning.

It couldn't be.

That hydrogen stuff morphed, in a nuclear process, into heavier stuff, into just about every kind of heavier stuff, if the truth is to be told, and occasionally the nuclear fires went out with a spectacular bang that men, when they became invented, would call supernovas, and scattered it every which-where they could.

The dust from that heavier stuff wasn't going to hang around, useless, for ever. It was going to coalesce into rocky chunks of matter and encircle other gaseous balls of flaming nuclear conflagration.

And it did that.

But not even that was the proper beginning.

Those balls of rocky stuff were hot to start with, too hot for a man to walk on (if men had been invented yet, which they hadn't). But time's a great cooler, and slowly they cooled down until you couldn't have distinguished one rocky wasteland from another rocky wasteland. In fact, there were so many rocky wastelands encircling so many balls of flaming gas you might think some kind of creation had occurred.

But it hadn't, because it wasn't anything like the proper beginning.

Time passed on one such rocky wasteland. Let's forget all the others, the millions of them, and just concentrate on this one. And it fulfilled all the requirements: it was rocky and it was a wasteland.

For so long it almost defies the power of mortal minds to understand, it was subject to assaults. Smaller rocky wastelands crashed into it, and comets made of humongous tonnages of ice, all manner of things assaulted it.

The thing about ice is it melts into water if subjected to a bit of heat, and this unbelievably huge conglomeration of comet ice did just that. Some of it rolled around in brand new oceans and more of it became a vapour, part of the atmosphere. And you know what? The vapour made clouds and the clouds made rain!

The rocky wasteland was no longer dry, and it had weather!

But this wasn't the proper beginning. It can't have been.

The very ingredients of living things formed in the chemical soups that some of the seas became over time. All the right ingredients were there, but then, if you think about it and study the subject, there aren't that many essential ingredients. Mostly carbon, wisps of this or that other elements, they were all there in unbelievable profusion, washed by the rains off the land.

And life, of a sort, began, spontaneously like things can.

Now, no man I ever met was there �" nor would tread the shores of those seas for many millennia yet, so who can say how that first primitive life formed? Did it hitch a ride from elsewhere across the vastness of space? Or did it ooze into existence on this rocky wasteland-turned-wet?

The thing is, this wasn't the proper beginning.

One of the qualities of life is that it, given a sufficiently long ocean of time, learns to replicate itself and become increasingly complex, and this life did. Eventually it even learned to swim in its watery paradise! Still relatively small (men of the future, once they were invented, would call it microscopic), it didn't stay small for ever. Put into the mix a billion years or so and it became frivolous. It swam and frolicked and even developed a kind of vision in order to detect light. And, eventually (more time, loads of it) some of it crawled onto where it wasn't so wet, and began conquering the land.

But it wasn't the proper beginning. No sirree, it wasn't!

Eventually it became big enough to shake the land when it walked (yes, I said walked �" it had learned mobility), and all would have been well had an echo from the distant past, (another, smaller, rocky wasteland) not smashed into the planet and disrupted things. Those gigantic creatures all shrugged their many shoulders and lay down and died. By their millions they passed into the Great Beyond of their ancestors or wherever it was they had planned for them, and for a while, despite a huge amount of turmoil, the planet was quiet. Not dead, just quiet.

Maybe it was ready for the proper beginning? If so, it wasn't to happen just yet.

Remnants of the gigantic reptilian creatures shrunk, grew feathers and learned how to fly. Other smaller creatures began to spread out and conquer the land that was inhabitable (not all of it was), and various species evolved. One of them was monkeys! And those monkeys, if men who hadn't been invented yet had got to thinking about it, were on their way to becoming men. Put more time in the mix, and that's what happened. In a place the future would call Africa.

But it wasn't the proper beginning.

That was when some bright spark, not long after writing was invented, wrote down his own fanciful account of how the world and everything began, foolishly ignored the classic “42”*, and had a bloke with a beard waving his magic wand somewhere closer to the end of life on Earth than it was to the beginning, and said that was how it had been. He had imagination, did that guy, and the cheek to announce that this was the real and utter infinite beginning! And all the long eras of slow change, of evolution from a rocky wasteland to a verdant paradise, were compressed by his rather fanciful account into six little days! How offensive to the majesty of truth is that!

But that, he said, was the proper beginning. You might call it the start of the end if you want.

© Peter Rogerson 17.03.13

*Refers to the answer to everything, as discovered in "The hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams

Reviews

[nk36n37e]

I love the choice of words that you use to describe such a process as comically unimaginable as the creation of Earth, it really does it justice.

But I love to play Devil's Advocate, so let me ask you a question:

Charles Darwin was a brilliant man, one of the greatest thinkers of all time. When he started working on his theory of evolution, he made a comment that very few scientists in his position would make. He said, "If the human cell starts off simple, then becomes complex, then my theory starts there. But if the human cell starts off complex, then becomes more and more complex as time goes on, then my theory can't hold water.

In this day and age, we have some pretty outstanding technology, technology that can look at cells with more detail then ever before, and it's pretty evident that the human cell is more complex than we could have ever imagined.

What does this mean for the theory of evolution, and has it lost some of the weight that it carries because of claims like this?

Love the writing, keep it up!
-Noah

[Peter Rogerson]

Darwin was indeed a great thinker but he wasn't the first to recognise that there's such a thing as adapting to environmental needs. Indeed, breeders of many animals, both domestic and farm, used the inherent tendency of species to respond to various pressures as they provided the market with a zillion different breeds of dog and ever leaner meat. It was Darwin who got in with the book first, and by saying that I'm in no way belittling him. And don't forget: everything he wrote was based on his own thoughts and accepted knowledge of the times in which he lived.

[Gerry Legister]

This sounds more real than fiction, Genesis has more than just the beginning and what you are describing is inspired imagery, its a lovely read

[Peter Rogerson]

I'm sometimes a tad confused by some people's refusal to put a calendar on events or accept the evidence lying in the earth all around them.

[Peter Rogerson]

Is it fiction? Maybe not. It's hard to tell where fiction begins and all the nonsense that isn't fiction ends...