what did the universe look like way way back, before everything, before earth formed?
79245
Before the earth formed, It was just the same universe, but without the Earth.
785441
I truly believe everyone has it backwards.  What if our "linear history" is actually severe misinterpretation of the data?  What if there really are “Earth Age Civilization Cycles” in which what we consider to be our historical “primordial beginning” is merely the Post-catastrophic aftermath to a former global technoculture that was wiped off the face of the Earth via a celestial onslaught, and what if the post-catastrophic survivors were catapulted into a “State of Neobarbarism” to begin the slow and gradual process of re-civilization all over again?  What if there have been several of these cycles?  What if terrestrial civilization has always been recurrent and cyclic with the development of several periodic global technocultures responsible for the amazing and titanic stone artifacts of antiquity littered throughout the world?  What if these highly advance and technological bygone Earthly civilizations were destroyed by some recurrent cosmocataclysm like clockwork every 12,000 years just as Plato claimed?  What if Earth was the original "seed" from which life dispersed “into” the Solar System, “into” the Galaxy and “into” the Universe?  What if “extraterrestrials” are merely returning to their home planet, Earth, and these beings are actually the descendents and/or creations from these utterly ancient global technocultures that once thrived upon the Earth?  What if the “Grays” were originally engineered by former human scientists from these former technocultures? What if the Grays are biocyborgs preprogrammed to collect and harvest genetic material and human DNA for the sole purpose to “reactivate” intelligent life on Earth in the Post-Cosmocataclysmic Period, a sort of “Noah’s Ark Project”?  What if other “alien species” were actually engineered hybrids from these utterly ancient scientific labs of past Earth Age civilizations for various purposes?  What if some revolted against their human creators and took refuge in space to escape the recurrent cosmocataclysm?  What if other planetary civilizations in the galaxy and Universe were actually seeded by us, e.g. by our ancestors from these extinct Earthly global technocultures?  What if they seeded life on Mars at one time, but the cosmocataclysm that destroyed our advanced Earthly ancestors also destroyed the civilization on Mars?  Yes, I truly believe everyone has it backwards.\n\nThe inception of human life requires hundreds of millions of sperm in the Universe of the Womb for just “one” sperm to successfully impregnate the one lone egg and bring forth life.  Could not this also be true on a macrocosmic level in the massive Womb of the Universe where countless stars are actually “required” to bring forth one star with life?  Hence, it may be that Earth is that one special seed of life?  This may be the exception and not the rule.  Indeed, I do believe everyone has it backwards.
76972
Science has no way of knowing what, if any, conditions existed before our universe began. There are any number of theories, but at this time absolutely no way to prove or disprove them. One of the more popular ideas is that our universe is merely a "small" bubble contained within some infinite Mother Universe. Another theory turns to quantum physics and string theory to try and describe our 4-D universe being "folded" up in a larger cosmos of higher dimensions.\n\nIt wasn't until some .000001 second after the Big Bang that the temperature of the universe had cooled enough (still more than 10e12 Kelvin)for a quark-gluon plasma to form. At .0001 second the temperature was down to 10e12 Kelvin and the first protons and neutrons emerged from the initial plasma
1048159
I'll assume you mean the beginning of the universe, not the beginning of the earth. The earth formed about 8 billion years after the universe did, so there was plenty of matter at that point.\n\nYou are wrong in saying that matter cannot come from nothing. There are always 'vacuum fluctuations' where matter and anti-matter are spontaneously forming and disappearing. This is a measured effect and is important in our understanding of electromagnetism.\n\nOn theory (and I want to emphasize that it is a theory) is that the vacuum with *nothing* in it is at a higher energy than one with *something* in it. The difference in energy is quite large and when the vacuum decayed, it allowed the formation of a *lot* of matter and anti-matter. Because of an asymmetry between matter and anti-matter, when thing recombined, there was a small amount of matter left over. This is the matter we see around us.\n\nAnother theory is that there was another 'universe' before ours that experiences a 'Big Crunch' and collapsed. There was then a type of bounce which formed our current universe. So there would have eben all the matter and energy of that previous universe to work from. This theory has recently been given more credence because of a calculation made with quantum loop gravity ( a proposed theory of quantum gravity).
577198
Both space and time were probably 'created' at the Big Bang. Think of it like this. If time itself began at the Big Bang, then there is no 'before the Big Bang'.\n\nAn analogy may be in order. Model spacetime by a \nsphere with time being  represented by going down \na longitude line and space for a fixed time being\nrepresented by a latitude line. The Big Bang would \nbe represented by the north pole. In this model, \nspace expands until we get to the equator and then \nstarts to contract again until we get to the south \npole, which represents a 'Big Crunch'.\n\nIn this model, ask what is north of the north pole. \nThis is *exactly* like  asking what is before the Big \nBang. There is no real answer because the question\nassumes that time exists before the Big Bang, but \nin fact, time is part of the structure of the universe \nand began at the Big Bang.\n\nIn the real world, the spacial part is three dimensional, \nnot one dimensional like in our model (the circles of \nlatitude). Also, it is likely that the universe\nwill expand forever, so instead of a sphere, a \ntrumpet shape may be more appropriate. But the actual \nmodels used by scientists are generalizations and\nelaborations of models like this toy model.
450787
When talking about the universe, asking "why" something is the way it is usually has no absolute, 100% answer.\nThe best answer to your question is that the universe somehow began over 13.7-billion years ago and immediately began expanding. The expansion has gone on, steadily increasing the size of the cosmos until we observe its vastness today.\n\nGod should be spelled B-I-G B-A-N-G\nPBrax@netscape.com
150705
The earth has evolved geologically, chemically, and biologically.  Geologically:  When the earth formed, it was basically a molten mass.  It cooled, and settled into layers, with the densest layers in the center, and the least dense in the crust.  The atmosphere of the early earth was basically methane, ammonia, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor.  The hydrogen escaped, the carbon of the carbon dioxide bonded with rock.I don't recall what happened to the rest.  But, when life began, it was life that found oxygen a poison.  However, when photosynthetic organisms appeared, they actually produced oxygen as a waste product.  Some forms of life evolved to be able to use the oxygen to permit them to more efficiently extract the energy from organic compounds.  As far as life itself is concerned, the first organisms, according to the current model, were extremophiles - they were one celled organisms living in extreme environments, such as the volcanic vents on the ocean floor.  Life gradually evolved from simple unicellular to more complex unicellular to multicellular.  Geologically, when the earth was new, there was very little land.  As a result of volcanic activity, grantic crust formed, which underlies the continents.  The continents, or rather the crustal plates on which they "float" have been moving since they formed due to convection currents within the earth's mantle.  So, the layout of the land forms has been changing, and with them, the ocean currents.  This has resulted in a gradual and constant change in climate.
846148
From what I have read, what happened before the big bang has no effect on the universe and therefore can not be theorized about.\n\nOr, as Stephen Hawking said in "A Briefer History of Time"\n\n"All our theories of cosmology are formulated on the assumption that space_time is smooth and nearly flat. That means that all our theories break down at the big bang: a space_time with infinite curvature can hardly be called nearly flat! Thus even if there were events before the big bang, we could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would have broken down at the big bang.\n\nCorrespondingly, if, as is the case, we know only what has happened since the big bang, we cannot determine what happened beforehand. As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences and so should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore cut them out of the model and say that the big bang was the beginning of time. This means that questions such as who set up the conditions for the big bang are not questions that science addresses."
699915
No. The world was not created 5000 years ago by a supreme being. It evolved into what we see around us through billions of years of change commonly referred to as evolution.
356868
how else would the universe have come into creation?  Before time existed, there must have been nothing, and at the first possible moment of time, there must have been some minute form of matter.  Whether or not the universe was created in a big bang, I cannot know, since if the big bang theory is true (as well as the Big Crunch theory), then it is possible that the universe has already cycled many times.\n\nBeyond that though, the Big Bang theory does NOT say that the size of the initial chunk of matter was infinitessimally small, it just says that it was supercompact.  It was probably insanely large, but relatively small for all the matter it withheld.
895712
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147\nhttp://universeadventure.org/\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_cosmology\nhttp://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_01.htm\nhttp://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni.html\n\nthe cosmic microwave background comes from a time when the universe was about 380 000 years old, and we see it in every direction we look, but the universe was much smaller then.  about 380 000 years after the big bang, the universe had expanded and cooled enuf for electrons to combine with atomic nuclei to form atoms (about 74 percent hydrogen and 26 percent helium).  light was then able to pass unscattered by the free electrons so the universe became transparent.  before this, the universe was much like a heavy fog.  we see this light today stretched to microwave wavelengths.  its spectrum shows a blackbody temperature of 2.7 kelvins.  that is 2.7 degrees centigrade above absolute zero.\n\nanything with a cosmic redshift of 1.7 is far enuf away that the expansion of the universe is carrying it away at light-speed, c.  the red shift of the cmb is 1089 so it seems to be receding at my times c.  redshift has three causes:  1) the rapid recession of a light source, 2) an extremely massive and dense light source, and 3) the stretching of spacetime due to the expansion of the universe.\n\nthe cmb seems to be at least 46 billion light years away, yet the universe is only 13.7 billion years old.
1162887
Silicon was not formed directly after the big bang.  After the big bang, pretty much the only material in the universe was Hydrogen.  This Hydrogen coalesced into stars and began to fuse into heavier and heavier elements.  Eventually, heavy enough nuclei were fused together to form Silicon.\nThe vast majority of all observable matter in the universe is still in the form of Hydrogen, the heavier the nuclei, the harder it is the produce with in a star and the rarer it is in the universe.
632232
Science explains that the world used to look more like a place called "Pangea", where all of the continents were connected. Over billions of years, the continents started to separate until they were in their present state.\n\nLook up "Pangea" for more information.
530611
The Precambrian is more of an eon than an era.  The Precambrian period refers to everything that occurred before about 600 million years ago.  Since the Earth is about 4.6 billion years ago, that means the Precambrian was 4 billion years long.\n\nIn terms of geological events in the Precambrian, everything from the formation of the planet, the hypothesized impact that tore off the chunk of rock that would become our moon, the cooling of the molten Earth and formation of the continental plates, the condensation of water and formation of the oceans, the abiogenesis of life, the formation of single-celled organisms, the development of photosynthesis, and the subsequent atmospheric pollution that created our oxygen atmosphere, even the first multi-cellular life all occured in the Precambrian Eon.\n\nThe next period, from 600 million years ago on, is known as the Phanerozoic Eon.  It is split up into the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic.\n\nThe Paleozoic was the longest period, from 600 million years ago to about 240 million years ago.  It was during this time that every living Phylum of multicellular animal evolved.  At first the seas were the only place where life existed, dominated by things like trilobites, crinoids and ammonites.  Fishes evolved in this period, and about mid-way through the very first land plants started to take root on the continents.  Insects soon followed, and then amphibians, which evolved into reptiles by the end of the period.  The Paleozoic ended with the largest mass extinction the Earth has yet seen, at the end of the Permian.  More than 90% of all species on Earth at the time went extinct.\n\nFollowing the Paleozoic was the Mesozoic.  Sometimes called the Age of Reptiles, the Mesozoic is split into three periods, the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, and lasted until about 65 million years ago.  It was during this time that dinosaurs evolved, and became the dominant life on the planet.  There were other notable reptile groups as well, such as pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, icthyosaurs and mosasaurs, and groups such as the mammals and birds also evolved during this period.  Flowering plants also made their first appearance near the end of this period.\n\nFollowing another mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous came the Cenozoic Era, also known as the Age of Mammals.  Adaptive radiation after the dinosaurs went extinct took the mammals from small, scurrying possum and shrew-like things into the wide array of hippos, horses, cats, dogs, bears, indricotheres, elephants, bats, monkeys and brontotheres of this age.  Partway through the Era, in the Oligocene, grasses evolved and changed much of the landscape of the planet as open prairie became a dominant ecozone.  This is the era we still live in today, our modern Holocene period is the latest section of the Cenozoic.
995661
no.  it changes over millions of years as the universe changes and our relationship to the sun changes, but i'd guess it was pretty close as to what is now.
736038
Would you like to see a real picture that was recently made of the beginning of the Universe?\n\nhttp://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/03/0217/
268015
The matter that made up the sun and planets existed at one time as a very large disk. As the matter clumped together, it was already on the same plane. That's the theory, anyway.