How Did The Universe Make Our Existence Possible?

From the largest cosmic scales down to the smallest subatomic ones, the same laws of physics define the entire Universe. The building blocks from which life arose on Earth weren't something that the Universe was born with, but rather needed to be created, astrophysically, over cosmic timescales.

We can learn a lot about the history of the Universe just by looking at each of our own bodies. A fully grown adult human is an incredibly complex system, made up of trillions of cells and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1028 atoms: the building blocks of all matter on Earth. The scientific story of what it takes to make a human teaches us an enormous about about not only the evolution and history of life on Earth, but of the entire Universe as well. Continue to read