How I Got Started

I got started around 13.8 billion years ago, give or take a few tens of millions of years. It wasn’t really a unique beginning, really—in fact, nothing could be further from unique, for we all shared this crucible.

Things started out very hot. Now, when I say “very hot”, I am really, really underselling things. There’s nothing that has ever been hotter, and it’s not for lack of trying: there’s literally no way to make anything as hot as those early conditions, because all of the energy was in one place.

As the space grew, I expanded too. From something tinier than an atom, the space around me was suddenly expanded to the size of a grapefruit or melon, or some other large type of fruit (oh, physicists!). When I say suddenly, I mean it took a total of about 0.000000000000000000000000000000009999 seconds for our universe to grow by 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times.

At this point, you and I were both in this little honeydew-sized space. So was Göbekli Tepe, our entire solar system, and another hundred billion trillion other solar systems. In fact, everything that ever was or is ever going to be, as far as we can tell, was there with us. Then, we got a lot more space.

We weren’t atoms, though. It was way, way too hot to have atoms, so we had to settle for being energy instead.

When this fabric expanded, so did the substance embedded everywhere. A few seconds later, the melon had grown to something the size of our solar system. Everything was still crammed into an incredibly tiny space (by the standards of the universe today), so things were still very hot.

Even still, they weren’t nearly as hot as they were during our melon phase, so individual particles could finally begin to form. Parts of me still needed to come together, and other parts still needed to be cooked up inside of stars, but I was well on my way to becoming myself about ten seconds in.

I was mostly hydrogen for a long time, with a pretty decent smattering of helium and just a hair of lithium making me up.

For eons, I was all over the place. Gradually, gravity brought some parts of me together, into a star that compressed much of me into a hot, dense core. The parts of me that were hydrogen got cooked into helium, and some of that helium got cooked into other elements that made me up. One day, these parts of me blew up, along with that star. My parts were scattered a bit, but gravity once again brought some of these newly cooked up parts together.

The explosion had turned those parts into much heavier atoms, so now I was calcium and copper, zinc and gold and iodine. I was still hydrogen and iron and oxygen, too, but there was now a lot more in the soup that became me. I was still swirling around out there, though, until my good friend gravity brought me into a little swirl of debris and rocky particles swirling around a center, like a whirlpool around an eddy in the water.

The center of this whirlpool lit up one day with fusion. Our Sun was born. I was mostly circling around this tiny ball of nuclear fire—tiny by comparison to the last star I was a part of, which was maybe 100 times bigger. Even still, the Sun holds my sway, and the rocky mass I’m now a part of is certainly stuck in its orbit.

Here I was, both on Earth and a part of Earth, just like today. Back then, I was swirling around the planet in billions of molecules and some bigger particles, while life began transforming the world around me. It took some time—about 4 billion years, give or take—before I formed into something akin to my present shape, although my ancestors increasingly were shaped more and more like me as time passed.

What about you? How did you get started?