Now boarding Spaceship Universe 30-By: prologue

Now boarding Spaceship Universe 30-By: destination everywhere

Its first journey through the humanly un-imaginable, perhaps infinite, certainly amazing Universe over 30 billion years. Give or take.

Before you board:

The first word. The hardest thing to write down if you think too much about it, but probably the easiest one if one does not. And yet, regardless of how easy or hard it may be, it is an essential - fundamental - building block with which we write books. Ideas. Papers. Stories. Movies. Because for us humans, every story has a beginning. And it often starts with a word. Even when it is as dull, as silly, or as plain as a word can be.

Obviously, no-one knows if the Universe started with anything that might resemble a word. So whether or not the Universe struggled to get its first word written out in order to kick start its existence is not only a matter of pure speculation/crazy-talk: it is also something we will never be able to know. Or test. At least based on what we think we know today. But, of course, there are things we can test. And experiment. And sort of know.

Which really brings us to where we should start this journey. A journey which, by the way, you are mostly welcome to take. It will be a dazzling and wide journey through our Universe and arguably most of what it contains. Be prepared to time-travel billions of years into the distant past and into the distant future. Be ready to space-travel billions, trillions of miles/kilometers (not sure how your mind works). And, most of all, make sure you question everything along the way.

Note that this is a journey which is available to everyone, and that requires little to no previous knowledge. This is not going to be a journey that reinforces how good/intelligent/knowledgable you are, quite the contrary. So if you feel like you are “too good” for what comes next and you feel like you know “all this already”, feel free to just skip the relevant chapters, or leave this book completely. Maybe in the future you will realize that there’s no such thing as being “too good” for anything and that this will never be about talking down to you (but rather talking at the same level with everyone!) you will come back. You will be most welcome then as you are now.

In the ship you are about to board - if you dare - there is no captain, and the crew is here to be questioned and doubted (so please, think, re-think and question everything!). The ship you are about to board is not made of anything solid; quite the contrary. It is made of what science is made of: an ever-changing mix of materials which although being always the best we can achieve, is never finished, never perfect, never concrete solid. And the only way we can make sure the ship functions is if we keep questioning it along the way, finding out all the weak spots, all its possible holes. So that we can continuously improve it.

 You should expect this book to take you through a series of journeys and stories, thoughts and discussions about our Universe and our place in it. We will find out what we think we know about it and the many things we know we don’t know. Obviously the things we don’t know we don’t know will have to be mostly excluded from the trip. For obvious reasons.

 Being somewhat planned by a human, the next few journeys (chapters) that you may be tempted to take (read) will undoubtedly be biased and very incomplete. They will often point you towards real-world analogies and visual impressions as a way to (hopefully) better understand the hugely complex phenomena and processes that we will witness whilst traveling. Obviously, you should never take what you see/read/think literally, even when it is incredibly tempting. Also, if at some point you happen to have an amazing OMG it all makes sense now moment, you should make sure you stop and question what you are feeling: does it really make sense, and is that really a good thing? As you will witness, while OMG moments can great, they often lead us to underestimate how much we don’t know, and to go with our natural attraction towards making sense of the World, even when it doesn’t, or even when we haven’t even seen the entire picture.

You should also feel free to take your journey through a completely different itinerary, by reading the chapters in a different order. That encompasses one of the more important ideas that will be present wherever and whenever we go: order, logic and our need to have things making sense is, as far as we know it, human, but not necessarily Universal. Forget about recipes, fixed sequences/order, and feel the freedom of picking your own road.

So if you dare to board this ship made of an ever-changing mix of substances/ideas that can both time- and space-travel billions of years and trillions of miles/km, and are willing to go all the way back to the Big Bang and witness the birth of the first stars, galaxies, and see all that’s happen ever since, through the sensors of this truly imperfect and human spaceship, then please be my guess.

Welcome aboard. Please note this is going to be a bumpy ride.