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by Steve Risner

The universe is huge. In fact, it’s far beyond any sort of human comprehension just how large it is. Even a light year is more than the human mind can conceive. A light year is just short of 6 trillion miles. The observable universe is a sphere around the earth that is 93 billion light years across. That’s 5.5 x 10ˆ23 miles in diameter (5.5 with 23 zeros following it). Very big. I think this is very interesting because of the time factors necessary for the Big Bang which leads into chemical evolution, stellar evolution, and the forging of heavier elements which eventually allegedly led to the formation of our solar system. Let me explain.

After the initial expansion began from a singularity, some cosmologists suggest there was a time of inflation that was exponential in nature. What that means is for a fraction of a second, the universe expanded really, really fast—much faster than the speed of light. They invented this idea out of nowhere to deal with a few issues that the Big Bang had. Problem solved. Just like dark matter and energy – these things were invented to account for the fact that the numbers don’t add up at all when calculating various things in the universe. In fact, we know so little about how the universe actually works that we need dark matter and energy as a fudge factor to account for 95% of what we observe! That means we know 5% of how things work, so we need to add in something we cannot see or measure or even know exists to make the math work. I think that’s profound.

But this blog post isn’t about all the made-up stuff they have to insert into the story to make it seem plausible. In this writing, I wanted to focus on what needed to happen and how long it took. A little backstory is needed.

Immediately after the Big Bang, it is believed no elements existed. According to exploratoium.edu, “About one ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, protons and neutrons formed, and within a few minutes these particles stuck together to form atomic nuclei, mostly hydrogen and helium. Hundreds of thousands of years later, electrons stuck to the nuclei to make complete atoms.”

So, it took several hundred thousand years for the elements of hydrogen, helium, and possibly a little lithium to form. These are the first three elements on the periodic table. This is the beginning of chemical evolution, or the evolution of elements from their basic parts and then into heavier elements. They then would condense, for some unknown reason, into what are called Population III stars. These are stars (which have never been found and exist only in theory) that only consist of hydrogen, helium, and small amounts of lithium. That’s because there were no other chemical elements for them to consist of at all. The idea is that after millions or billions of years, depending on the size of the star, these Pop III stars would burn out and expel their contents. While they burned, these stars were turning these 3 elements into other elements like oxygen, carbon, calcium, magnesium, and eventually iron and other heavy elements.

This is where the time issue might come into place. It takes about a million years or so to form a star, it is believed. So we’ve got hundreds of thousands of years for elements to form. Then we have millions of years for the first stars to form—some sources suggest 100 million years to as much as a billion years before these stars formed. These stars would live for millions of years if not billions of years before they went supernova and spewed their newly manufactured elements into the surrounding space.

Realize, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, that the universe is incomprehensibly large, but the entire universe has stars throughout in huge clusters we call galaxies. None of the stars we have observed are Pop III stars—those stars that are comprised solely of hydrogen and helium. Not one. Many of the stars we see are Population II stars which contain a small amount of other elements. Still others are Population I stars which have the highest metal content. But they are everywhere. Don’t believe me? Look up at the night sky on a clear night and see how many stars you can see—and that’s just in our galaxy which is one of around 125 billion galaxies we’ve spotted. Every one of those stars is a Pop II or Pop I star.

So we are to believe, that after these stars (which may never have existed) were born, burned, and died, they spewed their contents of heavier elements into space. It then gathered again into another star after an immense amount of time and lit the fuse in another star. And this has happened billions of trillions of times since it’s estimated that the universe has over one billion trillion stars (that’s 10ˆ21 stars). No one has an issue with this?

Come on. We are to believe that a star (more like trillions of them) vomited out its contents and these condensed over and over to generate all the stars, planets, and debris we see all over the universe? How is there enough time for this material to have expanded all across the universe? When ejected, at its fastest, the material from a supernova might travel 10% of the speed of light but in many cases it’s much slower than this. The shockwave also slows down over time. One such supernova remnant (what’s left after a star dies and explodes) was recently found to be expanding at 8 miles per second. That might sound fast in terms of an earth vessel like your car, but it’s hardly moving in terms of a universe that is 93 billion light years across. At that speed, it would take 135 days to travel from the sun to the earth. Light makes this trip in 8 minutes. That 8 miles/sec speed is .004% of the speed of light and rescuing devices like an inflationary period had to be invented to explain how light has made it 93 billion light years in less than 14 billion years. How much less plausible is a universe replete with galaxies which are packed with billions of stars each to have come about in 14 billion years after these Pop III stars, which no one has ever found, were born, burned all their fuel and exploded, sending their newly forged elements through space? It boggles the mind to see thinking people will buy this.

Using some average numbers, we can see the silliness in this core belief that the Big Bang hangs on. Galaxies are, on average, about 100,000 light years across. If ejected material from a Pop III star in the area of where one of these galaxies would eventually be, at a top speed of 10% the speed of light (being generous to this belief since that’s a higher speed and not a likely speed), it would take 1 million years for that ejected material to spread out over this entire space a galaxy would later occupy if it never slows (but it does). But it wouldn’t be very dense at this time. We need more stars that would happen to be nearby and happen to go through the same processes. At the above-mentioned speed of 8 miles/second, we would have to wait about 24 million years for the material to expand out over the entire galaxy we’ve imagined. Then we would need millions or billions of years for new stars to form and then “turn on” and later die and spew out their material and so on. Now, I realize that the belief doesn’t say one star died and all the billions of stars in a galaxy were formed from that exploding star. So we would have to have billions of Pop III stars live and die and eject their contents close together so they could be reborn as Pop II stars which would live and die and reincarnate as Pop II and Pop I stars (the only two types we see). But the point is there simply isn’t enough time and we’re talking about just one galaxy. The universe is brimming with billions of galaxies. Keep in mind as well that we are talking about average sized galaxies. Some galaxies are literally 50 times larger than this so all of these numbers would need to be multiplied by 50 (50 million years to expand at the speed of light and over a billion years at the rate of 8 miles per second).

There’s a great deal more to say about this topic, but I’ve run out of space (no pun intended). I will pick this up next time. Until then, think critically and trust God’s Word. According to Genesis 1:16, God created the stars on day 4 of creation. This was just about 6000 years ago, if we trust what the Bible says about it. We should trust in the One who created the stars and us and who made a way for us to know Him for eternity. Isaiah 40:26 says, “Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.”

God is awesome and out of His mind the stars of the galaxies were birthed to declare His glory! Praise Him.

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