Explore The Universe
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  • Letters from Canada 1 Journey to Canada
    • Letters from Canada - 2 Father Mark
    • Letters from Canada - 3 Friends
    • Letters from Canada - 4 Susan
    • Letters from Canada - 5 Linda
    • Letters from Canada - 6 William
    • Letters from Canada - 7 Retreat I
    • Letters from Canada - 8 Retreat II
    • Letters from Canada - 9 Retreat III
    • Letters from Canada - 10 Personal Burdens
    • Letters from Canada - 11 Mary Lost sheep
    • Letters from Canada 12 guilt
  • Letters From Canada 13 My Prayer
    • Letters from Canada 14 Susan
    • Letters from Canada 15 RCMP
    • Letters from Canada 16 Linda
    • Letters from Canada 17 Bishop, Think Tank
    • Letters from Canada 18 Contradictions
    • Letters from Canada 19 Marriage petition
    • Letters from Canada 20 experiencing God
    • Letters from Canada 21 purpose and meaning
    • Letters From Canada - 22 The Sermon
    • Letters From Canada 23 - Miracles
    • Letters from Canada 24 The Talk 1
  • Letters from Canada 25 - Rough Start
    • Letters From Canada - 26 Best Friend
    • Letters From Canada 27 Love & Heaven
    • Letters from Canada 28 Heaven & Quantum Mechanics
    • Letters from Canada 29 Changes
  • Soul & Brain 1 Conscious Self
    • Soul & Brain 2 wired to seek the sacred
    • Soul & Brain 3 The God Gene
    • Soul & Brain 4 Nervous System
    • Soul & Brain 5 Limbic System
    • Higgs Boson 6 - Neutrinos >
      • Higgs Boson - 5 Quantum World
      • Higgs Boson - 4 Quantum Reality
      • Higgs Boson - 3 Quantum Fields
      • Higgs Boson - 2 Electrons
      • Higgs Boson - 1 Intro
    • Soul & Brain 6 Jerry
    • Soul & Brain - 7 Olia
    • Soul & Brain 8 The Bible
  • To Boldly Go - 1 Asteroid Redirect Mission - Updated March 2016
    • To Boldly Go - 2 Commercial Space Ships Updated December 2016
    • To Boldly Go - 3 Asteroid Bennu Updated
    • To Boldly Go - 4 Orion, the Future
    • To Boldly Go - 5 Voyager Part A
    • To Boldly Go - 6 Voyager Part B
    • To Boldly Go 7 - Destination Mars Update
  • Goldilocks Universe - 1 Sun
    • Goldilocks Universe 2 Mecury Venus Earth
    • Goldilocks Universe 3 Asteroids Jupiter
    • Goldilocks Universe - 4 Asteroid DA14
    • Goldilocks Universe - 5A Jupiter Juno
    • Goldilocks Universe - 5B Juno Orbiting Jupiter
    • Goldilocks Universe - 6A Saturn Cassini
    • Goldilocks Universe - 6B non-Earth Life on Enceladus
    • Goldilocks Universe -7 Exoplanets
    • Goldilocks Universe - 8A Pluto New Horizons
    • Goldilocks Universe - 8B Pluto Atmosphere
    • Goldilocks Universe - 6C Cassini The Grand Finale
  • Neil Armstrong
  • Runaway Universe
    • Dark Energy
    • Dark Matter
  • Hubble Space Telescope
Goldilocks Universe - 1

Goldilocks,  a small girl wandering through the woods comes across a cottage, whose owners “The Three Bears” went for stroll.  For the sake of moving the story along, let’s ignore the neglectful behavior of her parents allowing their child to wander alone in the woods and why did “The Three Bears” move from a cave to a nice cottage.  Apparently the three bears had custom made furniture.  The Papa Bear had a large recliner, the Mother Bear a medium size recliner and the Child Bear a small recliner.  This applied to their beds and all the other household items.
 

Goldilocks made herself at home.  She found Papa Bear’s recliner uncomfortable, Mother Bear’s too soft, but Child Bear’s recliner was just right.  It turns out that everything made for the Child Bear in this family was “just right” for Goldilocks.  On the family table were three bowls of porridge.  If you guess that Goldilocks planted herself in the front of the Child’s porridge bowl, you are correct.  After enjoying the porridge, she fell asleep in the Child’s “just right” bed.  The three bears return to the cottage and awoke Goldilocks from her nap.  They were not happy with the intrusion and asked Goldilocks to return to her parents.


The story ends with the three Bears getting a TV commercial contract to advertize Charmin toilet paper and Goldilocks becoming a zoologist specializing in Bears life styles.
  
In recent times the Goldilocks story is being used as a metaphor and invoked by another group of people called Scientists.  They used to believe that Nature was governed by a set of unchangeable physical laws that were etched in stone. This is not true anymore. Advances in Astronomy, Quantum Mechanics and the other Sciences paint a picture that our very existence depends not just on a small number of physical laws but on thousands, possibly millions of “just right” events and developments.  The kicker here is that the physical laws and evolutionary events could be very different. If they were different, we and maybe all of life would not exist.  There is no scientific explanation or reason why the universe is “just right” for us to be here.
 
A simple but not obvious example is oxygen and the density of matter in the universe. Oxygen is produced by Stars and the universe’s density of matter is critical to the birth of Stars.  If the density of matter in the universe was greater than the current density, post big bang expansion would not continue due to the
forces of too much Gravity and the universe would collapse.  On the hand if the density was less than the current density, Stars could not be formed because Gravity would be too week to colapse the dust and gases into Stars.  If the universe matter density was not “just right” there would be: No Stars, No Oxygen (and every element we depend on produced by Stars), and No Us.
 
There are two different narratives that explain the Goldilocks Universe.  The first is that God is the Author of our Universe and through science we are trying to discover how God created things “just right”.  The second is the Multi Universe Theory (Multiverse) where given a very large number of universes; one universe out of a gazillion is bound to have things “just right”. I subscribe to the first narrative, and have a lot of problems with the second one. 

We begin our journey in our own Solar System.  Our Sun was born about 5 billion and 30 million years ago.  It took about 30 million years for our Sun to be born.  It started with a collapsing region (trillions upon trillions miles) of interstellar cloud of hydrogen gas and dust (material elements from Stars that exploded at an earlier time) to form a Stellar Embryo. In the next 100,000 years the Stellar Embryo gains weight by pulling in surrounding material.  At about one million years old, the Embryo becomes a Protostar. For the next 10 million years, the Protostar continues to grow larger as its gravity pulls in more surrounding gas and dust. What is not absorbed by the Protostar develops
into spinning disk of gas and matter that is coalescing into planets and asteroids. It will take the Protostar another 20 million years to contract (via gravity) to a point that triggers a hydrogen fusion nuclear reaction. Once the nuclear furnace was lit, our Sun became an active Star and our solar system evolved.

In the next addition of the Goldilocks Universe, we will explore the planets in our solar system and planets discovered by the Kepler Telescope in other solar systems in our Milky Way Galaxy.

Teaser: 68 are earth size planets.
  
Sources: Michael Albrow, Scientist, Fermi National 
                Accelerator Laboratory         
                Scientific American Magazine

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