In the beginning, nobody made anything. Although two things did appear, they were matter and entities. At first the matter was only the tiniest atom, hydrogen. But gravity brought them closer and closer until they compressed and created the brilliant stars. In these stars new elements were forged, creating the full periodic table.

 What about those entities?  Well, they are complicated; entities are kind of like what you’d think a spirit is. They have no physical form and are immortal. They can gain a physical form by taking over inanimate things like rocks and making a body out of it. The entities are extremely bored beings most of the time, and the only fun time they have is when they are creating. They can also have some pretty weird names.

Entities came in two different types. Both types were pretty much the same except for one minor thing. One type liked to build great structures like a nebula and just have it look nice. The other liked to build a great thing for a competition. Earth was one of the entities in the contest.

The contest wasn't official. Nobody had had them at a starting line and shot a pistol into the air yelling “start.” The unofficial rule was that whoever looks better by a landslide first wins. There was no prize except bragging rights, but that was a sufficient prize for the many entities that entered.

Earth had a dilemma. They couldn't think of any new ideas. Most entities couldn’t think of anything new because after a couple billion years of trying, almost everything gets thought of. Earth needed something new, something mind blowing, something bold. Then they thought, green. It was possible to get the color green, but it was extremely hard, and everyone had thought it was impossible to make an entire planet green. But how would you get green? It would need to be a compound, and probably a complex one too, and how would you make it, and what would the conditions for it to exist need to be?

Having a goal, Earth set out to the library. There were hundreds of libraries, but only one had a collection so large. As Earth approached the library they could slowly see more and more of it. The library took up an entire cubic light year and was made of gold and quartz with great pillars and a front entrance the size of the solar system. None of the materials were wood or had shells because life had not been invented yet. In the ginormous library was billions of billions of billions of metal books; the data contained on all of them measured in millions of petrabytes.

The first thing Earth did when they entered the great glass and ice doors was go up to the help desk. “Hello,” said the entity, using the desk as a body,” how can I help you.”

“Where can I find the section on chemistry, Pluto?” getting the name from a nameplate on the desk.

“You’ll be able to find chemistry as subsection 36 in the science section,” replied the desk.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. ” And off Earth went to the chemistry section.

The science section was pretty small compared to the rest of the building. It was still incomprehensibly large but only about ten times the size of the solar system. After a couple minutes of searching, Earth found the chemistry section. The chemistry section was rows and rows and rows of shelves containing millions of books. Sorting through all of the information would take millions of years for a mortal. Lucky entities had that sort of time, and they also had a trick. Earth rented a specialized locker to store their body (at the time a icy small rocky asteroid), left it in the locker so no one would steal it (a very common joke to play), and replaced the asteroid body with a book. The reason why they did this is that when an entity takes over an object containing information they instantly gain it. It is the perfect speed reading technique.

In only about a year Earth had worked its way through all of the relatively small chemistry section and discovered how to make green.  What the chemistry books taught is that green can be made by mixing a group of elements called CHNOPS together. But the thing that generated the green, a purely theoretical thing called a plant, was very fragile and needed perfect conditions.

So Earth went out to search for the perfect place where plants could survive and grow. Earth went out into the void of deep space. Deep space was dark and cold with only the tiniest pinpricks of light from stars hundreds of light years away. The entire universe was a sphere with holes to let the light of the universal sun above to come in, but the oceans of distances between those pin pricks doesn't matter to entities; they can control almost all aspects of themselves. Using their weight controlling ability, they can have negative mass. Because of this negative mass, they can go infinitely fast, and with minds compared to supercomputers on the scale of solar systems, all they have to do is practically teleport around and examine possible solar systems by flying by them. Flying around at 20,000 times the speed of light is pretty fast and would probably have destroyed entire galaxies, but they had negative mass, which turns your momentum negative. If it didn’t, the uncountable number of high speed collisions would have probably resulted in the destruction of every single thing in the universe.

Even going at such an insane speed sorting through an entire universe of stuff is long work, and in the end it took Earth over 100 million years to find the perfect place. It was around a medium sized star in a quiet arm of a normal sized galaxy in a boring part of the universe. The star's name was Sol, and the galaxy's name was Milkyway.

When Earth found Sol it was a new system and was extremely chaotic with uncontrolled asteroids and protoplanets flying this way and that, colliding and creating new objects. The first requirement for plants, the chemistry book had said, was size. The planet could not be too big or it would crush the plants; it couldn’t be too small or it would be easily destabilized. So Earth got to work collecting material, starting with a small rock about the size of a city, and working their way up to the size of a state, then a country, then a continent, and then a bit more than the current size of the planet earth.

The next requirement for plants was an atmosphere, preferably with lots of carbon dioxide to help them grow large and strong. To do this Earth went to the outer rim around where Jupiter is today and collected large amounts of gas and water, but not too much air because if that happened, the planet would become a gas giant, and those didn’t have any surfaces for plants to grow on. The third step was to get water, but Earth had already done that with step two.

The fourth and last requirement for life was to get a stable orbit in a place that's not too cold but not too hot either. The section of space that is like this is called the Goldilocks Zone. This was not too hard to find, and there was an open area where no planet orbited right in the Goldilocks Zone. All of the steps took a couple million years to do.

After all the work and millions of years spent working on it, Earth was coming into the home stretch. All they needed to do was wait and make sure nothing bad happened. But only 100 million years in, something catastrophic happened. Earth saw it coming from a long way but didn’t think it would get close. It was a planet about the size of Mars, but its orbit was as stable as a future elephant balancing on a future basketball, and it was on track to collide with Earth. When it did, it caused devastating damage.

Earth’s planet got shattered with debris getting flung into space, breaking several speed records for chunks of debris launched in a collision, taking a big chunk out of the planet. Earth was fuming at the planet and kicked it straight out of the solar system for the collision. The debris slowly coalesced into a moon that later would be very helpful. After another half a billion years life still had not emerged, and another big problem was about to hit. The late heavy bombardment. It was a swarm of asteroids launched into Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury by Jupiter, and it lasted millions of years. For years the inner planets were pounded by the asteroids. The asteroids didn't do much damage, and the moon helped protect against them, but Earth thought it would slow down life.

After that, the solar system was pretty stable; there weren’t any doom collisions, and most of the asteroids settled into orbits around the sun in the martian and kuiper belts and the Oort cloud.

And then Earth noticed something odd; the oceans were full of something. It was small and very simple. Then Earth realized, “I made Life!”

But it still wasn't green, though life fixed that slowly.  First there were bacteria, then plants, then animals. And finally, after billions of years, plants that could go on land. It took Earth billions of years and incomprehensible amounts of effort, but Earth had done it.

After waiting another millions of years for the plants to have grown sufficiently, Earth set out to go find others to show the plants off to, completely forgetting about the fragility of the plants. As soon as Earth started to leave the orbit, the temperature got cold and started killing off the plants and animals by the millions.  Earth had to go back and stay there to make sure that their hard work for life would survive. Earth was trapped and could not leave for fear of losing the plants and could not move it because it would kill them.

Earth sat there, weeping great showers all across the surface after spending so much time making life.

“Maybeeeeee,” said Pluto out of the dark, “you could send life out into space, to show off your creation.”

“But,” replied Earth, suddenly interested, “we can’t make something like that; it would be too small for us to make, it would be too complex.”

“Yes, but what if life made it,” Pluto replied. “You could set the conditions just right for life to want to be smart and explorative,” they explained. “And space would be the final frontier.”

“You are a genius!!!.” shouted Earth.

“You’re welcome.” And Pluto went back to their far orbit in the Kuiper, sitting there and thinking.

Earth went back, changing the environment to purposely mutate the creatures called monkeys into something smarter.

 

 

 

 

-Tommy W.