Imagine about 5 to 6 billion years ago. At some point, several supernova explosions all took place in a relatively close region of space, at roughly the same time, at the scale of time that these things happen on. The corpses of these stars were scattered out into the void, their hearts made of oxygen, carbon, iron, nickel, lead, gold and helium, the matter forged by the fusion of hydrogen atoms that made them bright, crushed together by the gravity of their own enormous mass. These were big stars, far larger than the yellow one we orbit now, so large that when they ran out of hydrogen and were all helium at their cores they didn't give up the way our star will, but simply shrugged their cosmic shoulders and began crushing helium together, and so on, and so on. This is how matter is made more complex, this is how the cosmos grows more complex.
This is important to us, believe it or not. We wouldn't be here if not for it. Anyway, several of these titanic forges consumed themselves and scattered their hard-crafted bounty in clouds of gas out into the void, and these eventually came together in one massive slow-cooling pool of coalescing matter out here, on the spiral arm of a reasonably large and complex galaxy. Over time, the cloud cooled more, and coalesced more, and eddies formed in it, and these eddies drew in more and more of the stellar material, drawing it together in clumps, swirling masses of these scattered elements. We live on one of those eddies, billions of years later.
One of the clumps of matter became a great gas giant with many moons, and another was nearly as large and would come to be graced with a sophisticated ring system. But in close, the greatest amalgamation of gases became a pocket version of the great monster stars that died so that it might live, a small yellow ball of heat and light become active. A star, which if not the largest or hottest ever, was relatively stable as stars go, a star that could last billions of years. This would also be important later.
In close to the newborn, a small ball of rock became so tied to the apron strings of gravity that it would lock, one face always bathed in the radiance, one side exposed to the void. A bit further out, a larger world would seethe with a harsh atmosphere of acid, burning hot with trapped heat and poisonous fumes. But the third planet, to quote a little blond girl who steals food from bears, was just right. At least, it would become so, in a highly subjective way.
But that would be much later. For billions of years, this third world would seethe itself, and slowly cool. A great blow would be struck that would tear much of its matter away into the void, but that blow would also form a shield for the world... a smaller sister who would absorb many such blows that would have otherwise struck home again. They danced together, almost a twin planet system, this young world and its younger sister, and they changed, because that's what time does. It changes things. For instance, it changed Napoleon from a fetus into a corpse. It did that to Lincoln, too. There were stops along the way there that I'm leaving out. Anyway, back to the world we're talking about.
The first great impact that created the moon also imparted a great deal of energy to the heart of the planet, even as a skin of rock cooled along its outermost surface, a fractured skin forever being drawn down into molten depths while new hot rock rose up to be cooled at the surface. These sections, scales, this mobile skin of the world was driven by the fury of the planetary furnace locked in its core, the molten fury of the heart of the planet. Over time, more of the impacts happened, evading the silvery shield in the sky and colliding with the still forming world, imparting the explosive energy of their arrival to the heart of the world. Winding the geothermal watch at the core of the world, keeping the scales shifting and grinding against each other. Water formed out of the atmosphere and fell upon the surface, covering much of it. In that water, newly fallen, the geological chemistry of the planet seeped into solution, also kissed by fallen material from the sky, also a product of the great explosion that formed all the things of this coalesced cloud of dead star guts.
This all took a great deal of time. Some call this deep time, the falling of year after year after year to get from event to event, so great a passage of time that to describe it in narrative terms renders it almost incomprehensible. Those folks haven't come up with a better way to talk about it, however, so until they do we're going to stick with a narrative, because that's what I do.
Oceans formed, and chemicals seethed in those oceans. Out of that chemical ferment the first long-chain carbon molecules formed, while the skin of the planet continued to grind and shift against itself, while rocks kept falling onto the moon, and occassionally getting past it to strike this rapidly blue-tinged world. Carbon molecules, what we today call organic chemistry, continued to form. Eventually, for whatever reason, these molecules clumped together much as the gas cloud that formed the whole world and all its sister worlds and their great burning nuclear companion had, and something not alive but closer to alive form. And got closer still, and closer still, until at last there was a living thing on the by now very blue world.
Remember, this took so long that by telling you this I'm annoying someone somewhere. That's a bonus.
The living things were anaerobic. That's a fancy way of saying that since there was no free oxygen on the planet, they didn't breathe it. Instead, they made it. Indeed, over more hundreds of millions of years (I can hear a cladastics supporter ripping his hair out) these industious little anaerobic critters made so much oxygen that today you can only find creatures like them huddled around volcanic vents in the deep ocean wondering what the fuck they did wrong. Well, they would wonder that, if they weren't totally unsuited to thinking at all, what with their having no brains, no neurons, and being unicellular.
The water became saturated with free oxygen. Oxygen spread through the mostly nitrogen atmosphere, bringing an end to the wild expansion of carbon molecules, since free oxygen is corrosive and causes the atmosphere to reduce, not encourage such things. (Now a chemist somewhere is also going mad at how oversimplified that statement was. I enjoy bringing pain to strangers.) In the water, a very long period followed where creatures that were unicellular thrived, followed by entities that were a few cells thick, entities that left very little behind to fossilize. After them were entities like amalocaris, who is very hard to describe so I won't try. After them came the arthropods, then the fish, then the amphibians, then the reptiles, the pelycosaurs, the therapsids, the archosaurs, the dinosaurs, the birds, mammals... a great deal of life. Many times life would reach a pitch of expansion and sophistication, while the great clock at the heart of the world ticked on, and the scales of the earth's skin would shift and buckle against each other, and then life would find itself tested and much of it would die, changed into something rather less alive by the passage of time. Time as the acid that breaks down all things, the suspension we all float in.
It's a lot to imagine. And in addition to the shifting atmosphere, stirred by heat falling from space and heat rising from within, and gases emitted by the molten clock, and even rocks falling and getting past the shield of the moon, life also preys on itself. These things happen over and over again. The trilobytes spread out, dominate every corner of the world, infiltrate every niche... and then they vanish, snuffed out in a cosmic trifle, gone utterly from a world they once so completely infested. The mighty pelycosaurs and therapsids die as the continents all collide together, leaving behind a few stragglers to grow fur and varied teeth and hide while the archosaurs produce titans who thrive and dominate every corner of thee world for one hundred and sixty million years, and then they die too. Over and over again.
What does it mean, you may ask? Does it mean anything?
Well, one could assume that the repeated impacts from above are the molten watch ticking at the heart of the world getting another turn, another winding, just as it has been since the beginning, even as our silver sister slows our rotation and shields us from impact. All part of the process, the means of production and what is produced at once. The cosmic DNA of the stars themselves telling them what to produce and how and when to release that bounty to space like spores to collide and writhe against itself, to condense, to form worlds and stars anew... and that every stage on the endlessly unfolding, terribly unlikely saga that moved this world from a red hot ball of gas to a rocky, mineral rich, water and air paradise for us is in fact the uncoiling of that cosmic DNA, be it morphic or implicate, that just as in our cells lies the very blueprint for all that lives that there is a field of force that tells worlds and stars how to be born and what to be born as. One could assume that.
Or not.
Happy holiday, you unlikeliest of miracles, reading this now.