This quote from Edward Robert Harrison – “hydrogen, given enough time eventually turns into humans”. How does it happen?
In: Biology
Because that is sort of how you got here.
There is no indication that humans are an inevitable result of hydrogen, but in the single case study we have hydrogen did eventually turn into humans after about 14 billion years.
Hydrogen is any atom with a single proton in it, so technically any single proton by itself is a hydrogen atom albeit technically an ionized one if it lacks an electron to go with it.
Protons came into existence shortly after the big bang and the universe just went from there to where we are now.
Technically you might argue that helium and lithium also got created in some quantity right after the big bang and that you can quibble if they ever were just protons and thus hydrogen before becoming those elements, but that would be hair splitting.
Hydrogen fuses into heavier elements in places like stars and those elements fuse into other elements there too.
For an ELI5 view the universe started out as just Hydrogen and from there things happened. stuff like stars forming and exploding and new stars forming from the remains of those explosions and planets forming from stuff left over after stars exploded and planets ending up hosting really weird self-replicating chemistry and those self-replicating molecules over time becoming more complex and weird and before too long they are what you may call humans.
At least this is sort of what happened here on earth and in our universe.
So we know of one universe where hydrogen given enough time turned into humans.
We haven’t had the opportunity to check out any other universes yet that started with hydrogen and similar laws of physics, so it might be premature to say that it always happens, but it did happen in all the cases we were able to check.
Latest Answers