AmBeam - Alone In The Universe | Текст песни

• Тексты песен
• AmBeam
• Alone In The Universe

One, where did we come from?
How did the universe come into being?
Are we alone in the universe?
Is there alien life out there?
What is the future of the human race?
Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe
was essentially static and unchanging in time.
Then it was discovered that the universe was expanding.
Distant galaxies were moving away from us.
This meant they must have been closer together in the past.
If we extrapolate back, we find we must have all been
on top of each other about 15 billion years ago.
This was the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe.
But was there anything before the Big Bang?
If not, what created the universe?
Why did the universe emerge from the Big Bang the way it did?
We used to think that the theory of the universe
could be divided into two parts.
First, there were the laws like Maxwell's equations and general relativity
that determined the evolution of the universe,
given its state over all of space at one time.
And second, there was no question of the initial state of the universe.
We have made good progress on the first part, and now have
the knowledge of the laws of evolution in all
but the most extreme conditions.
But until recently, we have had little idea about
the initial conditions for the universe.
However, this division into laws of evolution and initial conditions
depends on time and space being separate and distinct.
Under extreme conditions, general relativity and quantum theory
allow time to behave like another dimension of space.
This removes the distinction between time and space
and means the laws of evolution can also determine the initial state.
The universe can spontaneously create itself out of nothing.

We can calculate a probability that the universe
was created in different states.
These predictions are in excellent agreement with observations
by the WMAP satellite of the cosmic microwave background,
which is an imprint of the very early universe.
We think we have solved the mystery of creation.
Maybe we should patent the universe
and charge everyone royalties for their existence.
I now turn to the second big question: are we alone,
or is there other life in the universe?
We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth,
so it must be possible for life to appear on other suitable planets,
of which there seem to be a large number in the galaxy.
But we don't know how life first appeared.
We have two pieces of observational evidence
on the probability of life appearing.
The first is that we have fossils of algae from 3.5 billion years ago.
The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and was
probably too hot for about the first half billion years.
So life appeared on Earth within half a billion years of it being possible,
which is short compared to the 10-billion-year lifetime
of a planet of Earth type.
This suggests that a probability of life appearing is reasonably high.
If it was very low, one would have expected it to take
most of the ten billion years available.
On the other hand, we don't seem to have been visited by aliens.
I am discounting the reports of UFOs.
Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdoes?
If there is a government conspiracy to suppress the reports and keep
for itself the scientific knowledge the aliens bring,
it seems to have been a singularly ineffective policy so far.
Furthermore, despite an extensive search by the SETI project,
we haven't heard any alien television quiz shows.
This probably indicates that there are no alien civilizations at our
stage of development within a radius of a few hundred light years.

AmBeam еще тексты