This website has several purposes. It was initially intended as a source of information and resource materials for advanced high school students and undergraduate students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. This remains one its core aims, but several information areas have been added (History, Thought, Belief, The Modern World) and a second (perhaps equally important) aim is to provide information and resource materials for ALL students, about our origins and place in the Universe, as we presently understand it. The background Universe in which we live is vast in space and time.

It is hoped that people with specialist knowledge will contribute to some of the many knowledge areas throughout the website, to build up this repository of knowledge and information for students.

There follows a brief attempt to describe the immensity in which we exist, to try to give some idea of the extent of the picture that needs to be imparted to students.

By some current estimates, there as many stars in the universe as grains of medium-sized sand in a pile of such sand that would cover the continent of North America to a depth of over 260 Km, or the entire earth to a depth of about 13 Km (compare this with the number of grains of sand around you the next time you take a walk along a strip of beach).
Our own star, the Sun, can be thought of as a single grain of sand existing somewhere in this gigantic pile of sand. Of course our star actually has a diameter of around 1.4 million kilometers, or about 109 times the diameter of the earth.

The universe is vast. To get some idea, imagine rearranging the pile of sand from above into sphere, which would have a diameter of around 2300 Km. Now expand this sphere in all directions by a factor of about 1.4 × 10 ⁸, keeping the size of the grains of sand fixed, so that the average distance between each pair of adjacent grains of sand expands to around 71 Km (if the universe and the stars in it were shrunk so that the average star was the size of a grain of sand, then the average distance between the stars would shrink to around 71Km). At this point the sphere of dispersed sand would occupy a spherical region of space with diameter extending around 100 times the diameter of our solar system.

Finally, expand in all directions by a factor of around 3 × 10 ¹², this time expanding both the size of the grains of sand and the distances between them. With this scale of expansion, every millimeter would have been stretched to a distance of 3 million kilometers, each grain of sand would have expanded to occupy a volume roughly equal to our sun, and the sphere that previously extended over a region with diameter roughly 100 times the diameter of our solar system, would have now expanded to occupy the present universe.

The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, and our earth and solar system have been in existence for around 4.6 billion years. The earth will exist in one form or another for around another 7.9 billion years. While the future fate of the universe is not known for certain, there are several theories. One theory is that the universe will eventually begin to contract again and collapse back to a singularity in around 50 billion years, while other theories have the universe continuing to expand forever, eventually experiencing a cold death trillions of years in the future.

The first primitive unicellular lifeforms appeared on earth around 4 billion years ago. All of the diverse living organisms on earth today, including humans, are descended from these early unicellular lifeforms over the subsequent billions of years through a process that involved diversification, colonization of the land, and the development of increasingly greater structural complexity in living organisms.

If we were to convert time to distance and regard the history of the universe as a journey, using a scale of one inch to represent a year, then we are around 220,000 miles into this journey (which began with the birth of the universe). The first lifeforms appeared on land around 8000 miles back, the first placental mammals appeared around 1200 miles back and early primates around 950 miles back. Recognizably human ancestors of modern humans appeared about 45 miles back, modern humans appeared about 4 miles back in Africa, and began to spread throughout the world about 3/4 of a mile back. The development of modern civilization over the past 12,500 years corresponds to the last 1/5 of a mile of this journey before the present point.

The history of the universe will continue into the future, and with our scale of representing a year by an inch, the road will stretching at least 800,000 miles into the future, and most likely much further. What can be predicted to some extent is the future drift of the continental masses, the likely return of a glacial period at least 50,000 years ahead, the eventual melting of the polar icecaps, the erosion of existing mountain ranges and the uplifting of new mountain ranges, changes in star constellations, the disappearance of oxygen from the atmosphere and the end of multicellular life on Earth around 800 million years in the future, the evaporation of the oceans around 1 billion years ahead as the sun's luminosity increases, the evolution of our sun into a red giant and beyond (beginning around 5 billion years in the future).

The length of time humans will be present in the future of this journey depends on many factors, and barring some great natural catastrophe, to a large extent on humans themselves. The more we understand the nature of the universe, the better we may adapt and go forward. What is currently taught in our schools is lagging behind our current understanding of the universe and our place in it.

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