Human Universe (22 page)

‘As Re, Hathor and all the gods desire that King Izezi should live forever, and ever, I am lodging a complaint through the commissioners concerning a case of collecting a transport-fare.’

And so the letters continue; whilst the tombs are covered in the names of pharaohs and stories of the gods, the people of Egypt were using writing as we do today, and I find it wonderful, reassuring and moving in a funny sort of way to hear ancient voices complaining down the years. Perhaps we humans really will never change. From Dynasty 20, a millennium later during the reigns of Ramesses III and IV between 1182 and 1145
BCE
, the complaints continue.

‘The scribe Amennakht, your husband, took a coffin from me saying, “I shall give the calf in exchange for it”, but he hasn’t given it until this day. I mentioned this to Paakhet, who replied “Give me a bed in addition to it, and I will bring you the calf when it is mature”. And I gave him the bed. Neither the coffin nor the bed is yet here to this day. If you are going to give the ox, send it on; but if there is no ox, return the bed and the coffin.’

Alongside the letters, the ritual, the complaints, the admin and the legal documents, there was also a sophisticated literary and storytelling tradition in ancient Egypt, and a powerful appreciation of the value of the written word. Three thousand years ago on the banks of the Nile, during the reign of Queen Twosret, someone wrote a eulogy for the writers:

Writing was the final pivotal moment in our ascent from early agrarian civilisations to the International Space Station, because it frees the acquisition of knowledge from the limits of human memory. The hardware restrictions set down in the Rift Valley 200,000 years ago no longer matter. Writing allows a practically unlimited amount of information to be passed from generation to generation, and to be shared across the world. Knowledge is no longer lost but is always added to; it becomes widespread, accessible and permanent. A little boy from Oldham, Lancashire, can inhabit the mind of Newton, assimilate his lifetime’s work and derive new knowledge from it. Writing created a cultural ratchet, an exponentiation of the known that allowed humanity to innovate and invent way beyond the constraints of a single human brain. We now work together as a single mind spread across the planet and with a memory as long as history. It is this collective effort, enabled by the written word, that carried us, the human race, paragon of animals, from the Great Rift Valley to the stars. I deliberately borrow from Shakespeare; the most precious objects on Earth are not gems or jewels, but ink marks on paper. No single human brain could conceive of
Hamlet
,
Principia Mathematica
or
Codex Leicester
; they were created by and belong to the entire human race, and the library of wonders continues to grow.

The drive from the farm to the Soyuz landing site was agricul-tural. The Petrovich vehicles work as a pair, dragging each other out of snowdrifts when they get stuck. I wondered through the mildly paranoid haze that descends after 48 hours of wakefulness and 48 shots of vodka (which is not optional if Russian sensibilities are to be respected) what would happen to us if both vehicles got stuck. By dawn, we arrived at the GPS coordinates given to us by Roscosmos, and waited. We knew precise timings for re-entry, because those are given by physics alone once the de-orbit burn of 4 minutes and 44 seconds occurs. Recall that the Soyuz, along with the Space Station, was in a circular orbit travelling at 7358m/s, and the engine burn slowed it down by precisely 128m/s. This put the Soyuz into an elliptical orbit, which, when the breaking effects of the atmosphere are taken into account, put the craft on a collision course with Kazakhstan. It’s quite simple, and it works. In my experience filming with Roscosmos, the words ‘it’s quite simple and it works’ sum up Russia’s successful half a century in space. They don’t do things in as shiny, hi-tech a fashion as the United States; the Soyuz has been flying astronauts into space with minimal design changes since 1967. But today, the Soyuz is the only way to get to and from the ISS, and it is a reliable system. But to my inexperienced eyes, unused to the way the Russians do things, the return of the Expedition 38 crew after six months in space felt like a traction engine rally in Yorkshire arranged by Fred Dibnah. That’s not meant as a criticism, because I’d trust Fred Dibnah to organise a traction engine rally, and I’d trust the Russians to get me back from space. But neither stands on ceremony.

At precisely 9.23am, the Soyuz emerged from the snow-filled skies above the Steppe, swinging from its parachutes, and touched down with a burst of soft landing jets. One of our Petrovich colleagues saw it with his binoculars, and we headed off towards the spaceship in the snow. In one of the most bizarre moments of my life, we arrived, and, without thinking, jumped out and stumbled through the drifts towards the spacecraft. I fumbled around with the microphone for a while (recall that soundman didn’t make it), and then realised that there were no other vehicles around. A single helicopter had just landed; apart from that, there was only the wind driving gentle flurries across the Steppe.

Minutes later, the support vehicles arrived and Oleg Kotov, Sergey Ryazansky and Mike Hopkins were dragged from the hatch of their Soyuz, wrapped in sleeping bags and put into deckchairs. They looked happy, but knackered, and mildly discombobulated as a parade of Russian army generals in very big hats seized the opportunity for a photo. The Russians don’t overdo things; they just do them. Five times a year men and women make this voyage back to Earth having spent half a year in space, living amongst the stars on the International Space Station. Since the first expedition began on 2 November 2000, the station has been continuously occupied, and I hope that there will never again come a time when every human being is confined to Earth.

I carried in my pocket a reminder of my time in Ethiopia, the small flint we used for filming in the Rift Valley. I imagined a human, my great-great-grandfather, sitting somewhere in the vicinity of what would one day become Addis Ababa, diligently chipping away at the obsidian in my hand, the whole of history away. I set it down in the snow next to the Soyuz, descended from it as I am from him.

But, after all, who knows, and who can say

Whence it all came, and how creation happened?

The gods themselves are later than creation, so who knows truly whence it has arisen?

Ancient Brahmin Verse

There is tension at the interface between science and language. Language is concerned with human experience. Everyone understands what is meant by questions such as ‘Why are you late?’ ‘I’m late because my alarm clock didn’t go off’. But this answer is incomplete, and could be followed by a series of further questions in an attempt to establish precisely why.

‘Why didn’t it go off?’

‘Because it’s broken.’

‘Why is it broken?’

‘Because a piece of solder melted on the circuit board.’

‘Why did the solder melt?’

‘Because it got hot.’

‘Why did it get hot?’

‘Because it’s August and my room is hot.’

‘Why is it hot in August?’

‘Because of the details of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.’

‘Why does the Earth orbit the Sun?’

‘Because of the action of the gravitational force.’

‘Why is there a gravitational force?’

‘I don’t know.’

All scientific ‘Why?’ questions end with ‘I don’t know’ if you keep pushing far enough, because our scientific understanding of the universe is not complete. The most fundamental description we have for anything comes down to a set of theories describing the smallest known building blocks of the universe and the forces of nature that allow them to interact with each other. These theories are known as laws of physics, and when we ask about the origin of these laws, the answer is ‘We don’t know’. This is because in the Big Bang model, our understanding of physics before 10
^-43
seconds after the origin of the visible universe is virtually non-existent, and the origin of the laws lies at some point before that. ‘The laws themselves are later than creation, and who knows truly whence it has arisen.’ Our best theory of space and time, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, no longer applies at the earliest times; the conditions were so extreme in those first moments, known as the Planck epoch, that some kind of quantum theory of gravity, which we do not possess, will be needed to describe it.

The universe is now 13.798 +/0.037 billion years old, according to our current best measurements and theoretical understanding, and has been gently expanding and cooling ever since the Big Bang. The universe appears to be gently increasing its expansion rate, and approximately 68 per cent of the energy in the universe is associated with this sedate acceleration. The energy has a name – dark energy – but its nature remains one of the great unsolved challenges for twenty-first-century theoretical physics. Of the 32 per cent that remains, approximately 27 per cent is in a form of matter known as dark matter. The nature of this is also unknown, but it probably comes in the form of as yet undiscovered sub-atomic particles. The remaining 5 per cent makes up the stars, planets and galaxies we see in the night sky, and of course human beings. The part of the universe we can see is around 93 billion light years across and has reached a relatively chilly temperature of 2.72548 +/0.00057 Kelvin due to its expansion.

The question of the origin of the universe is an old one in philosophy, and often framed in terms of the ‘First Cause’ argument. Leibniz is associated with a ‘proof’ of the existence of God in this context, which goes something like this:

Everything that exists must have either an external cause or must be eternal. If there are eternal things, then they must necessarily exist, because they don’t have a cause. Since the universe exists and is not eternal, it must have an external cause, and to avoid infinite regress that cause must be an eternal and necessary thing, which we’ll call God.

This is quite a neat piece of logic, obviously, because Leibniz wasn’t an idiot. I don’t consider such questions to fall necessarily within the domain of science. Rather science is concerned with answering more modest questions, and this is the reason for its power and success. The goal of science is to explain the observed features of the natural world. By ‘explain’, I mean ‘build theories that make predictions that are in accord with observation’. This is a humble idea; there is no
a priori
aim to discover the reason for the existence of our universe or to build theories of everything. Science proceeds in tiny steps, attempting to find explanations for the blue sky, the green leaves of plants or the stretched, red-shifted light from distant galaxies. Sometimes, those tiny steps build up to something rather grand, like a measurement of the age of the observable universe, but that’s not what anyone set out to do. This is why science is more successful than any other form of human thought when applied to questions within its domain, which is the explanation of the natural world. It starts small and works its way slowly and methodically forwards, deepening our understanding in careful increments.

Our chapter title ‘Why are we here?’ might therefore appear to be unanswerable by science; it’s too grand a question. But that may no longer be the case, because the careful steps are taking science into this territory and the scientific language is now in place to at least address the question ‘What happened before the Big Bang?’ This is clearly a prerequisite for being able to make any meaningful attempt to address the reasons for our existence, although it is surely not sufficient. Immediately, I have to explain a semantic distinction before a thousand philosophers throw their togas aside and prepare to engage in a naked yet civilised and eloquent battle of ideas. I am defining the term Big Bang as the astronomer Fred Hoyle originally introduced it into physics in 1949. It is to be understood as the beginning of the hot, dense state in which our observable universe once existed. Conventional cosmological theory, as described in Chapter 1, traces the evolution of the universe backwards in time, with conditions getting hotter and hotter and denser and denser until the point where we are unsure of the correct rules of physics. Currently this is earlier than approximately 10
^-10
seconds, which is associated with the current power of the Large Hadron Collider. If the universe existed in some other form before the hot, dense state came into existence 13.798 billion years ago, then that’s what I’m referring to as the time before the Big Bang. Science might accidentally wander into Leibniz’s territory if, for example, this time before the Big Bang were discovered to be infinite, or that the state before the Big Bang was logically necessary and describable by current or yet-to-be discovered laws of physics. Such a theory would also have to explain precisely all the properties of the universe we see today. From a scientific perspective of course, we don’t care about Leibniz; it is not the role of science to prove or disprove the existence of God. Rather we are only interested in taking our careful steps backwards in time as far as the evidence and theoretical understanding allow. The exciting thing is that developments in cosmology since the 1980s now point quite firmly towards the existence of a state before the Big Bang as defined above, and that is primarily what this chapter is about.