I Like How the Universe Works

My youngest brother and I have been following the Cathay Pacific Signature Series about How the Universe Works on the Discovery Channel every Sunday.  Watching the program rekindled the geek within me and made me remember how I loved learning about the universe, galaxies, planets and the Big Bang.

Using CGI, phenomenons on theoretical physics are presented in amazing details and vivid videos.  I find recent discoveries on astronomy very exciting and mind boggling. 

The show is narrated by Mike Rowe (of Dirtiest Jobs, also on Discovery) and subjects are explained by famous astronomists and physicists such as Michio Kaku, Lawrence Krauss and Phil Plait.  From black holes to the Big Bang, galaxies to solar systems, you can't help but to get hooked and be fascinated.

Amongst the list of mind blowing facts that the show presented, the subject that I found most amazing is how scientists deduced the age of our universe starting from the Big Bang.  It's a fact that the universe (sometimes called cosmos) is still expanding, and it's from this expansion scientist are able to measure how long ago the cosmos was once a singularity.  Experts believes that our universe is at more or less than 13.75 billion years old, based from astronomical observations spanning decades.

13,750,000,000 years old!!!  WOW!  What a mind trip!  That's from the Big Bang, to when the universe was just a huge cloud of smoke, to present.  To put it in perspective, the Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago, and the anatomical modern human just appeared 200,000 years ago.  Quoting Neo: "WOAH!".

I crunched the numbers (bobo ako sa math, paki-correct kung mali), and created a simple visual aid:

What I took away from watching that particular episode is: Life is TOO SHORT, very, very, very short.  Compared to the age of our own planet, our time on Earth somehow seems insignificant.  And it's with this knowledge that gives me more desire to make each day count. 

Nobody knows why the Big Bang happened.  No one knows how and why the universe started.  No one knows how could everything came out from nothing.  We are alive now because only of chance; billions of years of cosmic growth - from cluster of gas clouds in one part of the universe formed the Milky Way galaxy, within that galaxy a star was born, orbiting that star planets evolved and a solar system was born.  It just happened that in one of those planet, conditions was perfect to support life.

It's a fact that every beginning has an end.  The universe will surely end.  Might as well do things that matter while we're here.

I recommend this program to everyone.  Sunday nights at 8:00PM on Discovery, or watch it on YouTube.