Covenant

43

That’s ridiculous.”

Rachel Morgan gazed at Hassim Khan as though he had just grown horns. Ethan too found himself intrigued by Hassim’s casual degradation of the miracle of life.

“Life is debris?” he asked.

“And nothing more,” Hassim replied. “It is a scientific fact that was uncovered decades ago. It concerns the fabric of our entire cosmos, everything that we are and everything that we’re made of, changing over time.”

“Then how come we don’t all know about it?” Ethan challenged.

“A question that I too would like answered. If all people were educated about the fundamental origin of life, then there would be far more understanding in the world.”

Rachel shook her head.

“How can life be everywhere and be debris? It doesn’t make sense.”

Hassim shrugged.

“When our universe was born in the Big Bang, it consisted of about three-quarters hydrogen, a quarter helium, a smattering of lithium and deuterium, and nothing else.”

“How do you know that?” Rachel asked.

“Because it still does,” Hassim said. “The rest of the universe’s mass is made up of dark matter and dark energy, substances about which we know very little indeed.”

“And we’re the debris?” Mahmoud asked.

“Absolutely,” Hassim said. “Look at yourself. Look at the room you’re in, the earth that we’re standing on, the air that you’re breathing. Think about anything chemical at all in this universe. Then think about what you’ve just learned. A universe filled with swiftly cooling hydrogen and helium gas, unknown dark materials, and nothing else at all.”

Ethan thought for a moment.

“We must have been created after the Big Bang.”

“Exactly,” Hassim said. “People think that the universe came into being containing everything within it and that stars, planets, and life evolved thereafter over immense periods of time. This is basically correct but it misses a most important point: that the young universe contained no heavy elements like carbon, oxygen, silicon, iron, and so on — nothing that makes solid matter like planets, trees, oceans, or people.”

“So where did it come from?” Ethan asked.

“Stars,” Hassim replied. “They all form from interstellar clouds of hydrogen gas that collapse under their own gravity, creating pressure and heat within. When the core of the cloud gets hot enough, it shines with nuclear fusion, just as our sun does now. What’s happening inside is that the hydrogen fuel is being converted into heat and light as atoms of hydrogen fuse together under the immense gravitational pressure: fusion. The thing is, when this occurs, only a small percentage of the mass of each atom is released. The rest remains within, and so the two nuclei fuse and create a new element, helium.”

“Which was already present in the universe,” Rachel said.

“Yes,” Hassim agreed. “From this process, a helium core grows inside the star, and when it’s big enough, it too begins burning with nuclear fusion, creating carbon. In stars, the deeper you go, the heavier the elements you find being created, all the way up to iron, if the star is large enough. When these stars exhaust all of their fuel, they blast their material out into space in supernova explosions to become part of the interstellar medium from which new stars are made. As the heavier elements build up in space after each generation, so the next generation of stars have an abundance of heavy elements that form planets and comets and asteroids in orbit around them: the things that we’re made from.”

Rachel blinked in surprise. “That’s where the Earth came from?”

“Yes,” Hassim said. “The process is called nucleosynthesis. This is where you get the sodium in common salt, the neon in fluorescent lights, and the magnesium in fireworks, not to mention the zinc in your hair, the calcium in your bones, and the carbon in your brain. The iron in the hemoglobin in your blood shares the same origin as the iron in the rocks of our planet. In your body there’s enough iron to make a three-inch nail, enough carbon to make nine hundred pencils, enough phosphorous to make two thousand match heads, and enough water to fill a ten-gallon tank. We are all chemical beings.”

“And all of this is ‘old news’?” Ethan asked.

“The physics behind all of this was worked out in the 1950s and early 1960s, using Einstein’s general relativity,” Hassim said. “Scientists like Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, and William Fowler did all the calculations long ago, and they’ve all been proven right with further actual observation of the stars using spectroscopy. William Fowler won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 for the work done. But it’s generally unknown within the public domain, and powerful faith movements prefer it to remain so. Their beliefs are all based upon a human-centric view of the universe, but nucelosynthesis proves that all life is merely a product of natural processes and not unusual or even unique to our world, their disinformation just a smoke screen to deceive the public.”

“But why does that make Lucy’s discovery so important to you?” Rachel asked.

“For two reasons,” Hassim explained. “Firstly, if genetic material from the remains that Lucy found can be extracted and analyzed, it may show what evolutionary path life has followed through natural selection on other worlds. And secondly, it proves what we already suspect: that life is as common as the stars that fuel its existence.”

“Several hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone,” Rachel murmured, “and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe.”

Ethan began to realize the scope of what Hassim was saying, and suddenly the existence of extraterrestrials didn’t seem quite so ridiculous after all.