13,879,000,000 years agoIn the dawning days of eternity, the jejune force and form evolved from the insipid formlessness of conception, and the matter blindly found its parents. This family bond was so strong - so incestuously irresistible to the prospect of creation - that an excess of ninety-two dephlogisticated living races came to term in a single termagant birth of immense proportions. , then joining frantically as if driven by an innate instinct written by natural laws… Under similar conditions, energy and matter will behave the same everywhere and everywhere, and no phenomenon will occur just once. There then accumulated immeasurably vast and elegant clouds composed mainly of the simplest and most adulterously careless stable element then as now – some fourteen billion years later: hydrogen. These forming and expanding seas of the one proton element flowed within, between and against themselves even as they swirled and swirled within the expanding Creation, carrying with them their lesser but more numerous brothers and sisters. heavier in the mixture. The most subtle and fundamental quantified entity. in the universe known as "tise", forever attached to each particle of matter and photon of energy like a permanent memory, has accelerated the condensation of these oceans of gas on themselves, even as the The space they inhabited expanded at superluminal speed, and facilitated their explosive contraction towards the formation of the first stars, galaxies, planets… and YOU. 850,000,000 years ago The potato-shaped mountain of cold, primordial iron had been a mute witness to the 3.7 billion years of the cosmos...... middle of paper ..... . were hovering at twenty degrees below zero and where winter temperatures at the poles allowed carbon dioxide to freeze into dry ice. “Snowball Earth” had begun. Outside the Ingram house – on a hot, humid spring evening, late in the season in this Big Apple suburb called Nanuet – the unexpected, oppressive heat of the withering afternoon had not yet subsided. freed the atmosphere from its stifling grip: viciously humid for human beings trying to fulfill their responsibilities; Viciously humid for their canine and feline companions relegated to a daytime life in the open air; Viciously humid too, for all the flying avian creatures that inhabit the dwindling woods and forests of this Rockland County. Once a pleasant balance of forests and suburban homes, almost every hamlet in the county was now almost exclusively the latter..