Video of the Week: 10 Alternatives To The Big Bang Theory (by Alltime 10s)

I’m going to go straight to the point and say that I knew that there were alternate theories regarding how the universe began, but I didn’t know that there were so many it’s possible to make a top ten list. Ten different theories about how everything began. It does make you wonder, doesn’t it? Each theory has been scientifically tested as much as possible, with as many resources that are at hand, but everyone knows that, unfortunately, we’re so very far away from finding out the truth.

The most popular theory is the big bang. If you look up into the universe and see all those galaxies moving away from us, and from each other, the logical theory that can be derived from that evidence is everything was, at one point, compacted into a single, incredibly dense, incredibly small, thing. Over the many years, we’ve gathered together plenty of research regarding how the universe would have been born from the very moment it all went bang.

Our technology is constantly growing more and more powerful with each passing year, as well as our understanding of the observable universe. If we were to compare how much we know now to how much we did know a few hundred years ago, it makes me wonder what would those who lived back then would say. Would they accept the theories based on the evidence shown, or would they dismiss them entirely? And the same thing can be said about what we’re going to learn in the next hundred years. If someone somehow turned up brandishing plenty of new theories and some evidence to prove how correct they are, would we dismiss them or accept them?

If someone came back from the future and told us they know exactly how the universe began, would we believe them? It doesn’t matter how many questions you try and answer, there’s always going to be more in the queue, and most of them are unanswerable. (For now?)

We have no way of knowing for sure what theory presented in the video above is actually correct. For all we know, none of them are. The answer to how everything began has yet to be discovered, or will it. We may come up with hundreds of theories, each one as strong as the next, but none of them could be right. All we can do is accept the possibility.

If we’re struggling to answer how it began, then maybe we can answer how it will all end. Well, no, actually, that’s just as unknown. The most prominent theory is that the universe is going to suffer from what we’ve called “the heat death”. Everything releases energy when it moves, when we move. Even sitting there doing nothing except watching videos uses energy because your body is still functioning – digesting food you’ve just eaten and extracting all the necessary nutrients, breathing and pumping blood through your body, blinking, clicking the mouse to go to the next video, typing the video’s name – it’s releasing a lot of energy. That energy disperses far and wide. If you’re walking outside, the energy that you’re releasing could leave the planet and explore the universe. The Heat Death theory states that with all that energy dispersing outwards, eventually in so many years’ time, all the energy in the entire universe would have spread out evenly enough that nothing can ever be created any more. All that would be left to die would be a few lonely black holes. This is the most accepted theory, and many people cannot deny the logic based upon the facts that we know today, but with all the facts that we’re going learn tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, in the next month, the next year, that theory may change. We might not be anywhere closer to discovering the actual answer, but we might have accepted something that seems more logical to us, and is therefore, for some people, that will be happy to accept that is the correct answer just to keep their minds at rest, as I have done myself. I do like imagining new concepts, I do like exploring outside the box, but I have accepted that this theory is the inevitable and final end of everything that the big bang has created.

 The only people who are going to know that are either going to be there when it all does end, and that has been predicted to be very unlikely unfortunately – yet even that’s unknown. Make you wonder what we truly do know, doesn’t it?

We know a lot about the universe. What it’s made of, how it works – this includes how stars are born and die, how galaxies are born, gravity, light, and so much more. We also know how big the observable part of the universe is. I know the amount of questions outweigh the answers, but we’re getting there, aren’t we? Great, yet another question. If you put everything that we do know into list form, that list is going to be large. Now double that, and then again, and then again, and that’s the number of questions we have yet to explore. Ok, that might be a bit of an over exaggeration. However, with each passing year, with everything that we’re going to discover throughout that year, and all the questions that are going to stem from those answers, eventually that number will be met, maybe even surpassed.

But then again, wouldn’t it be boring if we knew all the answers. Sure, it’ll be satisfying to begin with, but then you find that there’s no mystery any more. We wish that we know all the answers when we don’t know them, and there’s a chance that we would wish to not know them when we do. It’s best if we keep doing what we’re doing and slowly but surely discover new and wonderful things at our own pace.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadnouns)