The night sky.
Countless stars and the majestic sweep
of the Milky Way, but beyond our local neighborhood,
across the cosmos, there are over
two trillion more galaxies.
When we first began to observe galaxies,
we collected them like butterflies.
Little by little, we realized that
they formed a web.
The cosmic web is the infrastructure that connects
every corner of the universe.
You don't know anything about our universe
if you don't understand the cosmic web.
It feeds galaxies. It forms galaxies.
It is made of galaxies.
It's the architect of everything,
and our cosmic future depends on it.
The cosmic web is one of the most important parts
of our universe... It plays a key role
in the evolution of the cosmos.
Without the cosmic web, there would be no stars,
no planets, nowhere in the universe where
the conditions of life could exist.
How did the universe go from a hot soup of gas
to a cosmic web, sprinkled with galaxies,
planets, and us?
The universe may appear random.
Two trillion galaxies, spread across the cosmos.
But in this cosmic chaos,
scientists detect water.
When we first saw that the universe was full
of galaxies, it seemed like overwhelming chaos,
but it's not... They're all connected.
Galaxies link up in a gigantic cosmic network
spanning the entire universe.
How this pattern emerged may be cosmology's
biggest puzzle.
In some senses, you don't understand something
unless you understand how it comes into existence
and how it's formed.
And galaxies are the basic building block
of our universe.
To solve this mystery, scientists need to go deep,
to the very edge of the observable universe,
and study light from the first galaxies.
Chile, 2021.
Scientists point the VLT, or Very Large Telescope,
towards the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
It's a patch of sky famously photographed
by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.
The VLT's power allows astronomers to see
much deeper into space.
Imagine you take a grain of sand,
and you put it on your fingertip,
and you hold your arm out like this,
and you block a part of the sky looking
at that grain of sand... That's the size
of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and yet it contains
thousands of galaxies in it.
The telescope stares at those galaxies
for 155 hours and picks up the faintest of glows...
ancient hydrogen gas concentrated along a strand
of space 15 million lightyears long.
The filaments are just one tiny section
of the cosmic web, the largest known
structure in the universe.
The scale of the cosmic web is enormous.
It is, by definition, the largest thing
that we can see in our universe.
Today, the cosmic web is a lattice of filaments,
linked streams of hydrogen gas
that form an intergalactic network spanning
the entire universe.
Inside the nodes of the cosmic web,
you'll find galaxies and stars and black holes.
Along the filaments, you'll find gas
that connects these nodes, and the gas will connect
to the other galaxies and clusters of galaxies.
It's this beautiful superhighway of
large cities that are connected through these filaments.
We can see the cosmic web
about as far back as we can look,
and really, galaxies are forming along that web
all the way back.
This cosmic infrastructure dates back
to the earliest days of the universe.
13.8 billion years ago,
the universe ignites in a tiny ball
of super hot energy.
It expands and begins to cool.
Energy transforms into primitive,
subatomic particles of matter.
The heat from the Big Bang is so intense,
gravity is effectively powerless.
The very early universe was super hot,
super energetic, and regular particles
of matter were zipping around so fast
that not even gravity could hold them together.
But regular matter wasn't the only thing
in the early universe.
In the background, gravity is working
on something else...
Regular matter's ghostly cousin,
the invisible substance known today as dark matter.
It makes up about 85 percent of all the matter
created in the early universe.
Normal matter and dark matter both existed
around the time of the Big Bang, but they way they played out
was very different.
Just ten seconds after the Big Bang,
the infant universe is billions of degrees Fahrenheit,
still far too hot for regular matter particles
to clump together, but dark matter plays by different rules.
Dark matter isn't affected by the Big Bang's intense
radiation in the same way that regular matter is,
and so because it's able to cool,
it clumps together in a way that regular matter doesn't.
As dark matter clumps grow, they exert
a gravitational pull and begin to form shadowy structures.
As soon as the dark matter gets a foothold,
we have a place where there's a bit more stuff,
then that attracts more and more dark matter.
380,000 years after the Big Bang,
the intense heat drops to a few thousand degrees.
Normal particles of matter move around more slowly.
Protons and electrons bind together and form
atoms of hydrogen and helium gas.
Then gravity from dark matter starts to work
on regular matter.
Before you know it, you have this very clumpy
universe with these huge dark matter halos
that can now start to draw in also ordinary matter
in the form of gas.
A billion-year building project begins.
The dark matter clumps pulled in clouds of gas...
the foundations of the cosmic web and the galaxies.
Just as when you build a building, you know,
there's a lot of work that happens before
the building goes up, our universe spent
a lot of time laying the groundwork for
this cosmic web before it switched on the lights.
The foundations are complete,
but the job isn't finished.
How did those clouds of gas transform into the greatest
structure in the universe?
The secretive dark matter that brought the gas together
is also on site, managing the build.
It was really the dark matter that called the shots
in cosmic clustering, because it outweighed
the ordinary stuff by a big factor.
In essence, the cosmic web is made of dark matter.
Tendrils of material are stretched out across the cosmos.
As the sprawling structure builds, its gravitational
pull strengthens, pulling in more dark matter.
The clumps begin to collapse and shrink down
into filaments... these meet at even more tightly
packed clusters, creating a huge, dark scaffold
that drags in more hydrogen gas.
Imagine drops of dew on a spider web.
That's like hydrogen blobs being pulled in
to dark matter's cosmic web.
After tens of millions of years of construction,
strands of gas stretch across the cosmos.
Fast forward to now... The web appears
in all its star-spangled glory, lit up with galaxies.
We know at some point, stars and galaxies formed.
The big question is when... What were the first
galaxies like? That's a big mystery.
So how then did the lights of the cosmos switch on?
Evidence suggests that as the universe assembled its web
of dark matter and hydrogen gas,
the biggest stars that have ever lived
set the cosmos ablaze.
2018, scientists study an ancient galaxy,
the catchily named MACS1149-JD1.
There, they find some of the oldest stars
ever detected.
This particular galaxy is exciting, because it's
forming stars just a very short time after the Big Bang.
Those stars could hold clues as to how
the cosmic web that supports the universe
first lit up, but as astronomers study
starlight from when the universe was just
250 million years old, they get a shock.
The stars are not just made up of hydrogen
and helium produced in the Big Bang.
They also contain what astronomers call metals.
Metals in astronomy is everything heavier
than hydrogen and helium.
No matter where it is on the periodic table,
if you're not hydrogen or helium, you are a metal,
even though that makes no sense.
If I were king of astronomy, metals is right out.
The Big Bang only made hydrogen and helium.
Anything heavier than that was churned up in
the cores of dying stars.
The bright stars of this ancient galaxy
dating back to just 250 million years after
the Big Bang contain chemicals that were created
in even earlier stars.
Some of them seem to be nearly the age of
the universe, extremely old, and yet they contain
elements that guarantee they can't have been
the first generation... As old as these stars are,
there must have been something that came before.
The earlier first generation of stars
remains cloaked in mystery.
How did the first stars ignite,
and did they kickstart the formation
of the first galaxies?
It sounds like a classic creation myth,
it's out of the darkness, out of nothing,
structure arrived, and from that structure,
the galaxies, the lights in the universe, turned on.
We've never seen a first-generation star,
but physicists have a theory of how they formed
and what they were like.
Let's step even further back in time,
to around 100 million years after the Big Bang.
The early cosmic web is dark.
There are no stars to illuminate it.
But the universe is ready for stellar ignition.
Cooled down after millions of years of expansion,
the gas clouds clinging to the dark matter scaffold
begin to contract.
As the hydrogen gas clumps together,
larger clouds form super dense,
ultra hot cores.
If you can bring hydrogen together,
and actually get it hot and dense enough,
hydrogen will begin to fuse into helium.
There will be a nuclear fusion reaction going on.
Simulations suggest that some gas clouds are
hundreds of times the mass of the sun.
The stars they produce
are unlike anything that exist today.
So the stars around us today really top out at masses
between let's say 70 to 100 times the mass of our sun.
There's nothing larger than that.
These first stars were up to 1,000 times
more massive than the sun, so if you plopped it
in our solar system, it would extend
all the way past Jupiter... So think about that.
That is incredibly big.
That scale is mind-blowing.
So what happened to these stellar behemoths?
The lifetime of a star has a lot to do with its mass.
The more massive a star is, the more gravity crushes
the interior up to high temperatures, and it burns
through its nuclear fuel even faster, so incredibly,
the more mass there is, the shorter a lifetime
you get for a star.
The first generation of stars are sort of like
the rappers and rock stars of the universe.
They live fast, they die young.
First generation stars didn't live long enough
to form complex galaxies, but they did set
the process in motion.
The lives of the first stars may have been rock and roll,
but their explosive deaths and supernovas
pump the universe full of heavy metal.
In the galaxy today, we see a supernova
maybe every couple of years, close to us every
couple of decades... this must have been a fireworks show,
giant supernovas going off all the time, all around you.
That act of destruction is actually an act of creation.
What a star does in its core is it creates
heavier elements from lighter elements.
That first generation of stars must have been
absolutely incredible, simply exploding
so quickly and unloading all of this wonderful new chemistry
into the galaxy.
200 million years after the Big Bang,
the remains of the first stars flood the interstellar medium
with heavier elements, like carbon, oxygen,
silicon, and iron,
crucial ingredients for the next wave of stars.
It's such a beautiful story, because suddenly the whole
process of star formation changed,
and it literally became easier to make a star.
Heavy elements suck heat out of the surrounding gas.
Cooler clouds crunch down must faster.
The smaller, second-generation stars form rapidly
and in much greater numbers.
Somehow, this mess of stars transformed into a network
of young galaxies, but it wasn't easy,
because as these baby galaxies formed,
a breed of matter-hungry monsters
appeared in the young cosmic web.
13.6 billion years ago, the dark scaffold
that supports all the regular matter in the universe
emerges, ablaze with stars.
But how did this stellar array evolve into a structure
littered with organized galaxies?
It seems they formed under constant threat of destruction.
October 2020.
Astronomers discover a monster lurking
among the cosmic web's earliest structures,
dating to 900 million years after the Big Bang,
a supermassive black hole.
Six galaxies surround this cosmic giant,
caught in its grip, seemingly linked to
the supermassive black hole by filaments
of the developing cosmic web.
It's like the universe has given supermassive black holes
an umbilical cord.
It's like an all-you-can-eat buffet, right there.
Supermassive black holes are hungry beasts.
They feast on any matter that gets too close to them.
Supermassive black holes are likely some of
the most powerful objects in the universe.
They can be anywhere between 100,000 to 10 billion
times the mass of the sun.
Supermassive black holes have been a nemesis
for generations of scientists, not because of
their fearsome nature, but because nobody knows
how they grew so large, so early.
I wish I knew where supermassive black holes
came from... if I knew, I would have a Nobel Prize
hanging around my neck, and I would wear it
every single day.
As someone who deeply loves supermassive black holes,
whose career is based on studying supermassive
black holes, it is very frustrating to not
know where they come from.
Regular stellar black holes are the collapsed
cores of dead stars, ranging from
three to thousands of solar masses,
but supermassive black holes, those are a different beast.
Thirteen billion years ago, not enough stars
had lived and died to build something as huge
as a supermassive black hole.
Now, the cosmic web offers scientists clues
about the black hole conundrum.
We now know supermassive black holes grow
among the lattice of the young cosmic web,
gorging on the hydrogen gas that travels along the filaments.
At the same time, when the cosmic web
is lighting up, supermassive black holes
appear to be stealing star fuel from the young universe.
You might think that would kill a growing galaxy,
and yet most mature galaxies have a supermassive black hole.
They really dominate the physics of what happens
in the centers of galaxies, and even how galaxies
can evolve.
We think these galactic monsters have been around
from the start... How then did the web's
young galaxies develop around supermassive black holes?
The Milky Way's supermassive black hole is called
Sagittarius A-Star.
It's around 27 million miles wide and weighs in
at just over 4 million solar masses.
The environment around Sagittarius A-Star
is very dynamic... It can actually be
a really hellish place... There's this accretion disk
that's full of plasma, it's heated to
thousands of degrees, so you wouldn't necessarily
think that that's a great place for star formation
to happen.
But that's exactly where astronomers
decided to look.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array,
or ALMA for short, scientists scan
the heart of the Milky Way for dense cores of gas and dust,
stellar embryos.
They found more than 800 within just a thousand lightyears
of Sagittarius A-Star,
including more than 40 embryos with energetic jets
blasting from their cores, the telltale sign
of the birth of stars.
It's really surprising to find
those stars there... It's like hearing
babies' cries from a wolf's den.
It's not the place you would expect this to happen,
but in fact, stars are forming there.
Now, it's not as efficient as it is out here
in the suburbs where things are quieter, but it works.
Baby stars igniting and thriving around
a supermassive black hole, the kind of
hostile environment we know existed in the young
cosmic web... Star birth is a key part
of kickstarting young galaxies.
This evidence suggests that star formation
is more resilient than researchers thought,
and they've developed a theory to explain it.
Gas and dust race around the black hole
in the accretion disk... Heated to incredible
temperatures, plumes of gas break off
and blast into space.
The gas rapidly cools, collapses,
and forms baby stars... These accretion disks
are the most chaotic of stellar nurseries.
You see this mechanism that you think is violently
inhibiting star formation, and at the same time,
it's triggering the birth of new stars.
Matter clumps at the cosmic web's intersections,
feeding the supermassive black holes.
Around them, stars burst into life,
slowly building galaxies.
This could be how our own Milky Way formed
among the filaments of the young cosmic web.
But new research suggests that growth in these baby galaxies
requires murder and mayhem, and without them,
we wouldn't exist.
The infant universe is a dramatic place.
Stars ignite, and stars die,
even in the violent surroundings of supermassive black holes.
Baby galaxies form with the cosmic web.
But how do they grow?
Scientists believe the critical factor is galactic turmoil.
The universe does need to churn things up.
You need to break some eggs to make an omelet.
You need to introduce some chaos into your galaxy
to rapidly form stars or grow black holes.
Smashing things together is how the universe came to be.
The Hubble Space Telescope discovers many distorted
galaxies... twisted, battered, and torn,
victims of violent collisions on a cosmic scale.
Galaxies are never sitting quietly, doing nothing.
They're always undergoing change... they're constantly
encountering and slamming into and colliding with
and mixing with other galaxies.
You can see images in Hubble
of total car wrecks, of galaxies that are
trying to merge with each other.
We know that galaxies collide now,
but what about in the early universe,
when the cosmic web was beginning to take shape?
Astronomers study a strange galaxy named Himiko,
born just 800 million years after the Big Bang.
Three bright light sources suggest intense star formation.
Detailed analysis reveals not one galaxy,
but three baby galaxies, not yet fully formed.
Scientists call these youthful star systems protogalaxies.
The trio that make up Himiko are in mid-collision.
Computer simulations of the early universe suggest
protogalaxies smashed together with frightening regularity.
These violent shake-ups trigger star birth.
Protogalaxies are rich in gas,
and when they collide and merge, those gas clouds
collide and collapse and form stars,
sometimes, at prodigious rates, and after a billion years
or so, all of that structure forms, and you get
a formal galaxy.
Picture the early universe,
500 million years after the Big Bang.
It's smaller and more compact than today.
Cosmic collisions are common.
Imagine taking a bunch of cars and just letting them
drive around in Nevada where
there's nothing but space, right?
You're not gonna get too many collisions.
Now squeeze them into a tiny little city block
some place, and you're just gonna have accidents everywhere.
Well, it's the same thing with the universe.
When the universe was younger, it was smaller,
and these protogalaxies were everywhere.
It was crowded.
You were bound to get collisions between them back then.
More and more baby galaxies form at the growing
web's gas-rich intersections.
A collision between small protogalaxies
might trigger modest amounts of star formation
when regions of dense matter come together.
But a merger involving
protogalaxies with rich reserves of gas
can rev up the rate of stellar ignition,
supercharging a growing galaxy.
Gas-rich mergers can generate starburst galaxies,
where we see incredibly vigorous events of star formation.
Astronomers think one such smash-up,
around 10 billion years ago, kickstarted the growth
of the Milky Way.
A group of stars called the Gaia Enceladus Cluster
in the outer reaches of the galaxy
behaves strangely compared to other stars around it.
The stars in the Gaia Enceladus Cluster,
they're different, they move differently,
they act different, they're like... they're like
kids from the next town over showing up at your school.
You just know that they don't belong.
The Milky Way had already largely formed,
and then this massive cluster comes screaming in.
It was a violent event
that eventually ended up absorbing the stars
from this cluster into the body of
the Milky Way itself.
Galaxies are built from these kinds of collisions.
Less than a billion years after the Big Bang,
the dark scaffold of the cosmic web begins to glow.
Matter channeled down the web's tendrils creates
dense clumps of gas... Even in the turbulent
neighborhoods of supermassive black holes,
stars burst into life.
Baby galaxies collide, and the young universe
sparkles with light.
But an important question remains.
In the mayhem of the early universe,
how did galaxies like our Milky Way
survive and thrive?
Galaxy evolution is very dynamic.
Our understanding of galaxy evolution is very dynamic,
and there's so much that we still don't know.
There's a lot of different competing theories
right now as to how galaxies grew into the galaxies
that we see today.
It's a huge open question, and it's something that's
a big deal in science right now.
New research suggests that life and death
in the cradle of the universe lay within
the cosmic web.
13.6 billion years ago,
a protogalaxy, the infant Milky Way,
forms in the tendrils of the young cosmic web.
Today, it bears the scars
of many collisions.
Each one could have torn it apart.
So what controls if a young galaxy lives or dies?
May 2020.
Scientists image a graceful galaxy that existed
just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang.
Analysis of its light shows this
is a starburst galaxy, pumping out newborn stars.
Galaxies like our Milky Way are old and rather stately,
and they don't form stars very rapidly...
About the equivalent of the mass of the sun every year.
Well, starburst galaxies... Yeah, they form them
a lot more quickly... hundreds of solar masses per year.
But BRI 1335-0417,
4,650 times the mass of the sun every year.
It is blasting out stars.
Some young galaxies in the early universe
appear to be supercharged with star fuel.
How can they grow at such an incredible pace?
Scientists think the answer lies in the mysterious substance
that's controlled the flow of gas since the beginning...
The dark structure whose tendrils stitch
the universe together,
but exploring this cosmic network is no easy task.
When it comes to dark matter,
we're flying blind.
May 2021.
An international team of researchers investigates
dark matter in the local universe by observing
its effect on the path of light.
Gravity affects light.
A massive object causes light to curve
through space, even if that object is invisible,
like dark matter.
We can't see the dark matter directly, but we can see
what it's doing to the light... It's stretching it,
it's bending it, it's creating arcs in ways
that would never happen unless the dark matter were there.
Using an AI program,
the team analyzes 100 million visible galaxies,
looking for warped galactic light.
Because the model is artificially intelligent,
it gets better and better at finding dark matter.
What's very clever about this kind of algorithm
is that it's learning as it goes.
It uses the information that it has
to predict the existence of new structures.
As the model teaches itself to see
the dark matter behind the stars,
it maps out new, dark structures,
never-before-seen highways between galaxies.
There's a lot more filaments, there's a lot more
intricacies, there's a lot more cosmic web there
than what meets the eye.
It's like if you look how
Manhattan is connected to the land around it,
you can see all the bridges, but now we're also seeing
the underwater tunnels.
The new layout of dark matter reveals
the local universe is a bird's nest of hidden channels,
feeding galaxies with gas.
Galactic structures seem to thrive
at the cosmic web's most densely-knotted intersections.
Because multiple filaments are intersected
in those locations, and that is a location
of very enhanced gravity relative to other locations,
the material will be drawn in,
so these galaxy clusters are likely feeding off
the cosmic web.
This connectivity could be the key to the rapidly-forming
galaxies in the early universe, but there's a catch.
Sitting right at the densest regions of
the cosmic web can be really good for galaxy growth.
You have all of this gas being funneled in
for a new star formation, but being that plugged in
to the network isn't all good news.
There is evidence that, though the cosmic web
gives life, it can also take life away.
Scientists studying some of the universe's most heavily
connected galaxies found something unexpected...
Plummeting rates of star birth.
In some ways, it's a little bit counter-intuitive, right?
If these nodes are meeting grounds for all of
this gas, right, why aren't you forming more stars there?
One explanation? In the all-you-can-eat buffet
of the cosmic web's matter-rich junctions,
a young galaxy might over-indulge.
As the cosmic web funnels more matter towards a junction
and its growing galaxies, the gas influx doesn't
just boost star formation, it fattens up
the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core.
For a young galaxy, that's dangerous,
because when this monster over-eats, it produces
high-energy jets and belches out
super hot wind.
These black holes radiate tremendous amounts of energy
when they grow, and that radiation can
slam into the material around them in the galaxy
and blow it all out of the galaxy, launch it away
or heat it up to super high temperatures.
Star formation requires stuff, so if you blow that stuff
away, how are you gonna form a star?
And what's left behind would be what we call
a quenched galaxy that basically can't form any new stars.
The researchers found that although connectivity
within the cosmic web can boost galactic growth,
it was the super connected galaxies that died
the quickest, choked and stunted like over-watered plants.
Perhaps our Milky Way got lucky.
You could say that the Milky Way Galaxy is sort of
in this Goldilocks zone of galaxy formation.
It's been receiving enough gas over time that it's
been able to keep up with its star formation
but not so much gas that its central black hole
has been fed enough that it would clear the galaxy
out of gas.
The cosmic web determined if galaxies lived or died.
Its construction project brought order to chaos.
The cosmic web is the architect, the engineer,
the builder, the construction worker, even the interior
designer of the cosmos.
But now, work has shut down.
An invisible force threatens to tear apart the very
fabric of the cosmic web... What does this mean
for galaxies and for us?
The cosmic web brought order to the early universe.
The gravitational attraction of its dark scaffolding
helped build galaxies and fueled their development.
But growth tops out at the level of galaxy clusters.
Nothing bigger will ever form.
Something has stopped the formation of structure
in our universe.
To understand what's going on,
we need to return to the Big Bang
and the formation of the cosmic web.
13.8 billion years ago, the universe sparks into life.
A tiny ball of pure energy cools and expands.
The energy transforms into regular matter
and dark matter, but another force appears
at the same time... dark energy.
Dark energy, as far as we understand it,
which is not much, has always been here.
It's always been a part of the universe,
but it's been silent, in the background.
Dark energy is everywhere... It's over here,
it's over there, it's between you and me.
It's absolutely everywhere.
One theory is that dark energy never formed,
that it's just a constant in the laws of physics
that has always been there and always will be.
Some physicists believe that dark energy
is simply the force of emptiness.
People used to take for granted that space was empty,
a vacuum, but the discovery of dark energy
has made some people wonder if space is actually
more of a substance, and, um, that space also
might have pressure that causes things
to push apart, so, you know, whatever space is,
it might be more interesting than we thought.
Dark matter dominates the young universe,
but as the dark scaffold of the cosmic web grows,
it sows the seeds of self-destruction.
As the network of matter takes shape,
pockets of emptiness form between the filaments...
Cosmic voids.
In these expanding hollow spaces, dark energy grows.
The weirdest thing about dark energy is that
it has constant density... Constant density means
the more volume you have, the more dark energy you have,
so the larger the voids get,
the more dark energy they contain.
Dark energy pushes against the cosmic web,
opening up huge chasms in
the architecture of the universe.
Five billion years ago, dark matter's strength of
attraction is finally overwhelmed.
Like bridge cables in a hurricane,
the cosmic web's filaments stretch and snap,
and the universe's substructure fails.
Galactic construction freezes as the universe expands,
but darker times are ahead for the cosmic web.
As time goes on, not only is it expanding,
but this expansion gets faster and faster and faster.
As the dark energy in the voids increases,
the entire structure of the cosmic web
begins to break up.
The effects of dark energy will get stronger
and stronger with time, until the very fabric
of space time gets torn apart.
This isn't a superhero movie... The bad guy wins.
The future of the cosmic web is looking bleak.
Ultimately, it's gonna be
a cold, lonely universe.
Our closest galaxies will accelerate away,
until they're just tiny pinpricks of light.
Then the universe will go dark again.
Everything will fade out.
So the universe started with a bang,
but it will die with a whisper.
The cosmic web transformed the universe
from a hot mess to a sparkling structure.
It gave birth to billions of galaxies and us.
Without it, space would be
a much less interesting place.
This giant structure, the largest thing that we know of
in the universe, is responsible for nourishing the galaxies,
creating the stars, making the conditions right
to form life... we would not be here, talking right now,
if it were not for this cosmic web.
Understanding the cosmic web
is understanding dark matter, is understanding dark energy,
is understanding our past, is understanding our future.
Really, everything that we know about how the universe works
is directly tied to the cosmic web.
It's amazing to think that the overall structure of
the universe that we witness today began in the earliest
times of the universe and has yielded
beings like ourselves who can now
discover it and ponder about its existence.
That's pretty dope.