All Write, Already!

Nothing. The sort of black that you get because "the darkness hasn't been installed yet," to quote Terry Pratchett. No way of knowing how long this takes because there is no time and nobody around to observe its passage anyway.

Then white. A brilliant expenditure of energy rushing outward from a central point. Thirteen billion years pass while atoms huddle together for warmth and become dust, the dust congeals slowly and becomes stars, crap left over from the stars becomes planets, shit hits the planets and creates moons and asteroids, and things generally begin to get into the swing of the old universe game.

All of a sudden, on a backwater planet in orbit around a hayseed sun in a pissant arm of a boondock spiral galaxy in the forgotten corner of this crappy branch of the multiverse, something uninteresting happened. Well, it was uninteresting by the standards of colliding planets and exploding suns, but for the sake of this post it was pretty damn important. A bunch of folded polymers managed to replicate themselves more or less exactly.

While the more part was cool, the less part was significantly cooler. Over the next four billion years, cells form, blobby little weird fish-things get backbones, the fish-things with backbones drag themselves across the scary toxic atmosphere to increasingly distant puddles -- which, as it happens, makes some of them get lungs -- the things with lungs eventually become damn big lizards, some of the smaller lizards get this bizarre coating of hairs, the hairy things diverge into all sorts of shapes, including one group with surprisingly big brains and mobile digits, the long-fingered, big-brained things get stranger and stranger until they lose their hair again (makes you wonder why they went to the bother of having it in the first place), the hairless primates develop written language, cities, the egg salad sandwich, global war, mass transit, and rock music, and finally, as we rush up towards the present day, one group of these people, a particularly sexless group who will probably not be passing on their genes, develops TCP/IP, TFT displays, routers, and HTML.

Which doesn't explain why I find goatse.cx so hilarious. But it does give a bit of background on the issue.