Approximately 13.7 billion years ago ‘most’ Astronomers and Planetary Scientists tend to agree that the ‘Big Bang Theory’ came into existence with the introduction of ‘singularity’ which is a gravitational force, which alongside heat, matter, water, carbon and hydrogen became the building blocks for life.
As time went on, nebulas, rocks, gasses and ice began to interact and quite a few years later the solar system we have began to know and love was formed. This was approximately 4.6 billion years ago, in a Goldilocks region (meaning all the ingredients and circumstances are there to sustain life) – we call this little planet Earth. What happened next? Well we estimate 3.8 Billion years ago the combination of heat, calcium and water created single cells such as bacteria, evolution would suggest 1.1 billion years ago saw the introduction of our first sexually reproductive organisms. Fascinating – what about people? Well, Homosapiens started walking, actually limping the earth only approximately 0.2 million years ago. Not long when we think of the above timeline.
Right so, we in one paragraph we have looked at the fabric of life – lets taken a breath and settle down. It’s now 2016 and humanity is still effectively in its infancy when we compare ourselves to the earliest of life based theories.
Why go through all the above? Because as people we are by definition all exactly the same baring a slight, pigmentation genotype which effects our appearance. If we follow our family trees back 3.8 billion years ago we would see, via a telescope a single cell named prokaryotic.
What is fascinating is if we lined up in a row all our portraits or selfies as they may be known now of all our family members from the beginning of time we at first would see slight differences from our father, then his father, then his father – as we continue to look at the portraits and the thousands and thousands of generations are flying by we would start seeing resemblance of the above evolutionary diagram. If we continue to follow through millions of years of selfies so to speak we would go all the way back to our good old grandparent – the prokaryotic cell.
It add further gravity to our place in the solar system so to speak, should life be looking through a telescope in the next Galaxy down (The Andromeda Galaxy) the light would take that long to travel between galaxies that if they were looking at this second they would only be able to see when dinosaurs walked the earth.
Mind blown ……
What is beautiful in my eyes, is that we as humans are all exactly the same. We are miracles in survival, that despite numerous cataclysmic events, we are not just here but thriving – sometimes against all the odds. Plagues, sickness, famine etc – yet we progress and continue to evolve and will do for the millions and billions of years to come.
Despite being exactly the same, yet we are behaviourally different. We are athletes, scholars, musicians, artists, cartoonists, L&D Advisors and so on. We have cultures, religions, experience, skills and personalities which bounce and support one another.
Albert Einstein stated that ‘Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.’
In 2016 I find it hard to accept that individuals and institutions do not celebrate each other’s differences with respect, positivity and enthusiasm. As we looked at earlier, biologically we are all but the same baring slight appearance based features. We live lifestyles which differ and with that we bring new skills, experience, knowledge and style. As Einstein alludes we are all geniuses in our own ways.
Working in L&D it is fundamental that I believe the same, everyone has skills and qualities and my job is help these geniuses achieve regardless of any sociological label or definition.
To summarise, we’re all the same yet we’re all a little bit different, we’re all geniuses and with respecting each other thoroughly imagine what the next million years may look like.
Thanks for reading!! @TheCraigKaye
thecraigkaye 