Juggling Expansion and Foundation: The Pace of Cosmological Growth

Everything in the universe was essentially created by "cooking". Carbon, iron, and all the other elements were forged in extremely hot -- hotter than the middle of the hottest stars -- "furnaces". These "grills" were the supernova explosions that occur when a massive star (10x-20x the size of our sun) collapses in on itself so that the electrons enter the nucleus, essentially becoming neutrons, and create density so high that one spoonful of the collapses star would way 200 billion pounds. The side effect is an enormous amount of energy, and it is this blast, equivalent to a trillion hydrogen bombs exploding, that occurs during a supernova, which heated and forged the matter and elements of the universe.

Then on earth, the pattern continued, when there needed to be a greenhouse effect (created by CO2) to cook the nitrogen, sulfur, methane, and CO2 into biological life. The earth's "stove" -- CO2 greenhouse -- prevented the earth from freezing and created biological life from gases and elements, and the universe's "stove" -- supernovae -- created matter and the elements.

So our planet only began forming 4.6 billion years ago and was in its basic full form 4.4 billion years ago (after the 200 million years it took to create the earth through collisions and aggregation) making earth only 4.4 billion years old (or 4.6 if you include the birth-like aggregation process) In the middle of this point, Mars crashed into earth breaking of fragments of the earth's crust, which in about to weeks, formed the moon. Because it is composed of earth crust fragments, the moon doesn't have an iron core, like the earth.

This is all fascinating, but what is truly interesting is that our pace of discovery seems to be generally, in balance with our base for understanding, but sometimes this gets out of whack.

We, as humans, are almost thinking "too" expansively in our quest to investigate the origins and answer questions about the universe. For example, the Big Bang theory was facetiously coined by Hoyle during a 1937 radio talk show. This was only 7 years after Pluto was discovered by Tombough and Lowell and 41 years before we discovered Pluto even had a moon, in 1978. Isn't this like trying to worry about where to put our millions of dollars when we've only received a minimum wage pay check, or planning how to clone humans once we duplicate an amoeba gene, or asking how can we create a human bio-robot without knowing that all of our phalanges have finger or toenails on them?

It is terrific and essential to think expansively so science and our understanding constantly grows and our research never stagnates, but expansiveness is a balance because if you are too expansive too quickly, then you often and easily fly over fundamental steps or considerations -- like considering about the origin of the universe without knowing Pluto has a moon. Obviously both considerations are vital, the universal probably more so than details about Pluto, but research needs a base, a fundamental groundwork, layout, and foundation to support its findings. Let's make sure we are working with solid basics before expecting massively tremendous growth in the universe questions. However, it is vital to balance both -- work on the base simultaneously while asking questions that require a base.

This is like the starting of a company -- you ask for money from venture capitalists and investors and take out loans to expand the company. Almost never does someone have 2 million dollars in cash and use it to build a company right off; no it is an improvising, dance of debts, credits -- questions and answers -- stretching the limits of the base money -- or basic understandings of our solar system and universe -- to build a company -- or understand the bigger picture. The trick and the gift is to recognize the simultaneous juggling act of expanding without a base, while building the base that supports the expansion, equivocally. The base doesn't need to become more complete if it doesn't have "expansive big question answers" to support, just like you can't go finding out about the details of the universe's origins (big expansive questions), if you don't create awareness of how the universe forms without knowing basics about earth (fortunately we definitely know about the and have balanced the growth of expansive thinking and fundamental answers with equilibrium).

Similarly, if your expansive thinking causes you to hire employees, by expensive technology, and splurge on advertising for the company, but you don't have a steady income stream or that much starting cash, you run the problem of going bankrupt without the base. But, on the other hand, if you have a huge base but don't invest or get clients (expansive thinking), its just as bad as going bankrupt because you won't doing anything. Simultaneously juggling the internalizing, centering (centripetal), basework with the externalizing, expansive, seeking, abandonment of centeredness (centrifugal) force is the key to balanced, strong, and secure growth in business, cosmology, or anything else.