Boomer News

Becoming Human

Okay kids, if you recognized your grandfather as Tom Longford in the previous five very short chapter blogs … you were right. And I morphed you 11 grandchildren into 10-year-old 5th graders in the stories. On November 3rd PBS NOVA is presenting a 3 part mini series on “Becoming Human“. I’m curious to see how close our account of the past million years matches up to the PBS program information.

Since our scientific interests have been mostly on two subjects; trying to understand the cosmos and human thought, we will be interested to see how NOVA  handles the beginning of human consciousness. When did the lights come on in the human brain? When did the first human look up at the heavens and ask; “What’s it all about Alphi?”

NASA’s  Swift telescope has located the after glow of  a monstrous super nova explosion that happened 13.1 billion years ago. Perhaps it was one of the very first stars to come on some 630 million years after the Big Bang.

When the human conscious lights came on … appears to be  more difficult to determine then when the lights came on in our universe.