history_of_universe.zip
Unpacking our past, starting from the Big Bang, to see how cosmic patterns affect our present and hint at our future.
Our story is not just humanity’s story. It is the story of the cosmos shaping itself—step by step—into us, and possibly beyond. Today I will take you on a whirlwind tour through our past and point out how it affects our present and hints at our future. As we go through this curated history, I will point out a few things.
Important gaps in our knowledge. These unknowns are potentially very significant, yet they aren’t considered much in our modern discourse.
The pattern of evolution that occurs at every level of existence, including
Optimization,
Conglomeration,
Increasing time scales, and
Specialization.
By the end, I hope you will sense these cosmic patterns, of which we are a growing part. We are not required to continue the patterns, but we should at least be aware of them, their effects on us, and why they exist. Then we can better decide what to do.
(Last week, I said this week we’d dive into our political systems. But that post will make more sense after covering this topic first.)
Let’s start from what we think of as the beginning.
The Big Bang
We don’t know how it happened. We don’t know what happened before it, or what caused it. This is a huge knowledge gap, which leaves uncertainty about what this is all for and what it means, if anything. All we know is that the Big Bang did happen—a hot, dense explosion of matter seeded with possibility—and now we’re here.
Our earliest direct measurement of the universe is from 379,000 years after the Big Bang. We will one day be able to measure the ripples from less than a second after the Big Bang. What secrets might they hold? I argued last week that such discovery is worth our collective investment.
Galactic Evolution
The universe cooled. It went from milky-smooth plasma to slightly denser bumps. The gravity of the bumps attracted more mass, turning into bumpier bumps, then gas clouds, stars, and galaxies.
Galaxies differed in size and composition, which caused variation in many characteristics, including survival. Those with unstable cores or insufficient mass flung themselves apart, or were devoured by larger neighbors. Those with too much star formation burned out. The galaxies we see today have gone through evolution (i.e. The more something can exist, the more of it exists). They inherited traits from their history, like dark matter and angular momentum. They have outcompeted other galaxies for mass. Having arisen from the primordial plasma soup of the early universe, they are the ones that survived.
This includes the Milky Way, with its steady central supermassive black hole, stable dark matter halo, well-formed spiral arms and disc, abundant gas reserves, star formation rate that is neither too fast nor too slow, favorable location in a relatively quiet area, and diverse population of stars with heavy elements. It has survived several mergers with previous galaxies due to its size, and it continues to grow by siphoning material from the nearby Magellanic Clouds.
In other words, the Milky Way is the product of intense evolution, which seems to be a fundamental law of the universe, and possibly of the Universe1.
Earth
Earth is also part of the evolution that led to you reading this right now. It is extremely fit for supporting life and maintaining long-term geological stability. It has appropriate distance from the Sun (which is itself highly stable), diverse chemical composition, protective magnetic field, dynamic plate tectonics, moderating greenhouse effects, abundant liquid water, lunar tides, stable orbit, and seasonally varying axial tilt. Life can only arise in suitable places for life, so it is unsurprising we find ourselves on such an ideal planetary stage.
Biological Evolution
Scientists have shown that complexity inevitably arises under certain conditions. And so, it seems, complexity arose. Simple chemical attractions and repulsions did their random work in some protein soup until computation began. By computation, I mean the ability of molecules to store and process information encoded in their structure. Once we had computation, we had evolution. The more something could exist, the more of it existed.
I want to point out the shape of this evolution. We began with tiny proteins, jittering rapidly, forming and breaking within fractions of a second. The ones who could persist and replicate dominated. They optimized energy and resource usage in that environment to survive. These conglomerated eventually into cells, which lasted much longer than individual proteins and were therefore optimized for longer time scales. Within cells, organelles developed—some having been independent cells who were captured, like mitochondria—allowing specialization.
Cells then conglomerated to form multicellular organisms, which seems to be highly favorable, as it occurred independently at least 25 times in evolutionary history. This further increased specialization, as cells differentiated into various particular functions. Multicellularity also allowed persistence over longer time scales: cells could die and be replaced, preserving the pattern of the organism through many generations of cells, lasting for days, months, years.
It is important to note that evolution optimizes for survival and reproduction in a specific context. In the biological world, context changes all the time, such that the well-known fitness landscape is more accurately viewed as a dynamic fitness seascape, ever shifting due to environmental conditions and the presence of predators and prey. So of the two gifs below, the bottom one is more representative of reality.
Humans
Evolutionary psychology has much to say on how our ancestral environment imprints upon us today. We developed emotions, which are decision-making shortcuts optimized for longer time scales, connecting momentary decisions to decades-long relationships by instilling primal senses of fairness, aesthetics, and care. We conglomerated into social groups, which allowed specialization within tribes, such as childcare, hunting, gathering, tool-making. Those tribes could persist over even longer time scales, allowing for the propagation of the genes of the genetically related groups.
With the invention of tools, language, and customs, we had the beginnings of cultural evolution. This was a profound shift, as cultural ideas affected the survivability of societies more than their biological traits. Tribes who were too aggressive or not aggressive enough died out. Tribes who cared for each other too much or too little died out. Optimization. Cultural evolution dominated in rate of change over genetic evolution because genetic change requires many generations of life and death, whereas a cultural shift can happen within a single generation. Our genes have therefore remained largely the same since prehistoric times, which makes our primal instincts and emotions poorly suited to demands of a vast, interconnected society. More on that in next week’s post on democracy.
Technology
Human inventions accelerate all these processes. Our technologies could be said to optimize optimization. Language and writing optimized dissemination of culture, with culture itself a technology. Religions, especially Christianity, optimized literacy and shared sense of purpose. Capitalism optimized the processes of specialization and finding value in most economic contexts. Democracy optimized large group decision-making2. The scientific method optimized the process of finding useful truths.
Such technologies are also far easier to change than biology. Many animals today have vestigial structures, which are obsolete organs or features that only persist because it is not easy for biological evolution to get rid of them. Technology and ideas, however, can easily remove such features, or add them. Car designs can implement innovations from airplanes or insects. Meanwhile, insects themselves can only modify existing structures. As a result, humanity is no longer bound by the slow process of biological evolution. We are the architects of our own future, for better or worse.
Our Present and Future
Evolution has brought us here, shaping everything from the structure of galaxies to the diverse complexity of life and human societies. It optimizes relentlessly across all scales of existence. And it will continue into the future, whether we guide it or not.
An important knowledge gap: we don’t know if we are alone. If there is a rival civilization nearby, we may be at risk of being out-competed in the evolutionary sense. And our previous knowledge gap about the origins of the Big Bang means that our whole universe could be in competition with other universes.
In other words, we may still be in the midst of trial-and-error survival dynamics. So we should try to avoid being the error, the suboptimal structure that fails to persist. If we wish to have a lasting, positive impact on the universe (and Universe), we must align ourselves with the unavoidable cosmic patterns. Optimization, conglomeration, specialization, and the lengthening of time scales have proven to be the engines of survival and flourishing. We would be wise to embrace them.
So we should come together as a global society, as cells once conglomerated into multicellular organisms and tribes into nations. This does not mean losing our individuality but celebrating specialization—honoring those individuals, communities, and nations who excel at nurturing, creating, discovering, and building. By collaborating on a planetary scale and focusing our decision-making around longer time scales, we can prepare for threats we cannot yet see and opportunities we cannot yet imagine. Will we manage to adapt in these ways, or will politics prove to be a more difficult constraint than physics, collapsing us into the waves?
I am optimistic, which is why I am writing this Substack. To me, finding the optimal direction requires understanding the current state of the seascape as deeply as possible. From there we can chart a course toward the optimal peak. And in order to move entire societies, we need widespread understanding, or at least a willingness to trust to experts who specialize navigating these waters.
If you see this as a worthwhile endeavor, please share this Substack with anyone who might be interested in creating more rational societies.
Unlike biological evolution, social evolution does not require death. We can change our social genomes—our ideas, institutions, and technologies—without sacrificing the present generation. The universe has given us the ability to guide our evolution consciously, with intention rather than by accident. Let’s not waste it. Let’s evolve.
The Long Future
The cold, lifeless end to everything—a.k.a the heat death of the universe—looms over us. But this is an untested hypothesis, i.e. a knowledge gap. We may yet find a way to prevent or escape it. If so, humanity and its descendents would have the potential to affect reality eternally, a vastly large purpose, something like what I covered last week. There may be no end to the good we can do, to which you can contribute with your actions right now.
Achieving such an outcome will require much scientific exploration, discovery, and communal sacrifice (taxes, for example). Heat Death and Taxes is dedicated to these very long-term goals and how we can move toward them with what we do today.
Hopefully you can now see evolutionary patterns all around you. Memes go viral or disappear based on shifting public popularity, sometimes occupying tiny niches. Viruses and bacteria evolve around our medicines and our own evolving immunities. Empires, nations, corporations, religions, plants, animals: all rise and fall. Persistence and change rule the world.
Where else do you see these patterns at work? What other cosmic patterns do you see? What can they teach us? Let me know in the comments because together we can begin building something vastly larger than ourselves.
Now that I’ve covered this important aspect of our natural history, next week I’ll get to our political situation, I promise. 🙂
I will use the lowercase “universe” to refer to the observable universe, and the uppercase “Universe” to refer to the larger reality, which includes the universe and may include more.
Democracy optimized decision making in its specific context of the fitness seascape, a context which I will argue next week has changed.
One implication in this post that stands out to me is that humans inhabit a position of observing, interpreting/theorizing, and forecasting the patterns we now call evolution. To me, this suggests we hold a position of potential intervention in the pattern(s) of evolution--which could be quite a powerful position (or perhaps a doomed one...)! I'm curious if you consider your call to "align ourselves with the cosmic patterns" to be within the realm of intervention, or quite different? Either way, are we involved in a kind of "meta-evolution" (heh) attempt?
On another note, my average-level knowledge of evolution did not include the four features you lay out here. Nor do I think the average person typically considers evolution through the lens of patterns; I think we are used to assigning it the role of a scientific law or principle (despite some controversy in the U.S.) in the same way we think of Newton’s Laws. I’m finding this new info and framing interesting to munch on—and it does make me want to consciously re-examine the links between “pattern” and “principle.”