Our sun was already burning for over 350 million years when Mintaka exploded into life. You can easily view Mintaka today in the Winter and Spring. It can be found during the evening in the South West and is the most westerly star in Orion’s belt. At the time Mintaka ignited around 4.25 billion years ago, something special was happening on Earth. The conditions were conspiring to allow a miracle to take place: the first life was forming. Just as Mintaka was starting out on it’s life cycle, so too was life emerging on Earth.
The night sky is full of stars that allow us a connection to the story of our struggle to determine and uncover the meaning of the universe and our place in it. If you connect the three stars of Orion’s belt in a line and move from Mintaka downwards towards the horizon, you will come to the brightest star in our night sky called Sirius. Sirius formed 250 million years ago – the last time the solar system was at its current point in its orbit around the Milky Way’s centre. Life had really established itself by then on Earth. Already, the dead deposits of life were beginning to layer up and form fossil fuels like the coal we burn today releasing the energy that old life captured from the sun when it was alive.
It was only a short 20 million odd years later after the formation of Sirius that the first Dinosaurs started to roam the Earth. By the time Everest was forming (60MYA), and the first primates were appearing, the Dinosaurs had been wiped out. A comet or asteroid hit the Earth in Mexico around the same time as the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago.
Life continued for a long time – millions of years – before our ancestors started to evolve. If you have good eyesight and a very dark place to observe the night sky from, you can stimulate your eye with old light that left its source at the time that the first member of the genus Homo appeared. In the Autumn around midnight, if you look directly overhead and allow your eyes to adapt to the darkness for around half an hour, you will be able to receive light from the Andromeda galaxy. It will appear quite hazy and can be made clearer with the help of binoculars. The light that enters your eye is 2.2 million years old. It left Andromeda when the first vaguely human-like ancestors had evolved.
In this passage, we have moved from billions of years ago and the formation of Mintaka to a couple of million years ago and the age of the light arriving on Earth from Andromeda – the furthest back in time we can see with the naked eye.
Our time scale has to decrease by a factor of ten to 200,000 years ago before we see the first anatomically modern humans appearing in Africa. This is the age of light that has travelled from one side of the milky way galaxy to the other. A further 100,000 years pass before those Human’s get up and go and leave Africa – the first major geographic expansion of our ancestors.
By 30,000 years ago, there is evidence that we had started to wonder and think about our place in the universe. It was at this time that our ancestors had painted pictures of the pleiades on the walls of caves in France. When we look out to the rim of our Milky Way galaxy with our telescopes, we are collecting light that left the edge of our galaxy when man’s artistic and technical skill was exploding. We had also begun to try and uncover the workings and principles of the universe so that we may make predictions and plan for the future. It is from this time that we have evidence of the first calendars being developed. By 12,000 years ago we had started to bend nature to our will. This was around the time of the end of the last Ice Age and marked the Agricultural Revolution.
Astronomers recently found what they think to be the oldest star in the universe. This star (called MSS J031300.362670839.3) formed not long after the Big bang and is aged 13.7 billion years old. The light we collect from this star is 6000 years old and left the star when human recorded history began. Stone age man has left us monuments from his time on earth that illustrate that we were thinking about immortality, the afterlife and the role the celestial heavens played in our lives and deaths. For example, burial chambers aligned with the winter solstice are from this period.
By 3000 years ago, the evidence is clear that man had become fascinated with cause and effect, though often confusing correlation with causation. Ancient civilisations in the middle east and China were observing and recording astronomical events such as eclipses and trying to interpret what they meant for prosperity here on Earth. For the next 2500 years, eclipses, comets, and particular alignments of planets were all recorded by different civilisations on Earth and interpreted as omens or signs that were either good or bad for human life on Earth. The observations and recordings increased in accuracy and were used by humans to try and uncover the meaning and structure of our existence. From lunar eclipses in 413 BCE dooming Athenian forces, solar eclipses in 557 BC causing Larissans to give up their city to their enemies the Persians, to further Lunar eclipses in 1453 marking the fall of Constantinople to name a few.
By the 1600s, Galileo and others were starting to apply the scientific method of observation and experiment to these celestial events. By pursuing the scientific method with ever improving technology such as the telescope and later the printing press, man has made huge progress over the last 400 years in uncovering the structure and the principles of physics that govern the behaviour of the universe. We have moved from simply observing and predicting the place of planets and stars in the night sky to uncovering the principles and laws that all objects obey in the universe.
Throughout this journey of existence, we have struggled to understand. A lot of what we do is working towards uncovering the mysteries of our surroundings and existence. By understanding the journey we have been on, the mistakes made in the past and learning from history what have been the most fruitful methods we can supercharge our own lives contribution to the struggle for mankind’s understanding.
It may be enough to know that while we may not uncover the absolute truth and secret of existence, it is enough to move the needle on a small bit for future generations.
This work of struggle to understand can only take place if we are prosperous and secure enough to survive and continue in comfort. This is one of the great gifts of science as a technique in this endeavour. Not only has it increased our understanding of the universe, but as a side effect of that deeper understanding, our life quality has improved to the degree that we can spend more time figuring out and thinking.
You too can start on that journey of understanding by taking a Science course. Find out more here.