13.7 billion years ago, an everlasting void and equilibrium, a cosmos, does exist. What that state of the Universe precisely is, is ill-known. Energy can abruptly come out from that cosmos through quantum fluctuations. Quantum fluctuations are very high energy vacuum spots which transform such an energy into matter and light. It's one of such fluctuations which gives rise to our Universe under the form of the Big Bang, as a powerful energy field breaks the equilibrium at one point, and initiates a motion. The present day Universe emerges from there. From the very first seconds or fractions of second, to the eons along which the history of the Universe unfolds, from the very first bricks and fundamental forces of Nature, to the stars and galaxies, it's the same motion, the same forces at work: those which have been born at the moment of the initial fluctuation
Our Universe is mainly made of hydrogen gas, which stretches in vast filaments along a continually making of space and time. Such an expansion is determined by the tremendous, initial energy of the Big Bang. First stars appear along the filaments 13.5 billion years ago, as such first objects in the Universe live and die, releasing in space the first complex elements there -of them the building blocks of life, and turning into the first black holes. Black holes are objects of the largest density and gravity in the Universe, as they interact with their environment. First stars and first black holes merge to form the first galaxies. Galaxies are gatherings of stars with a black hole at their center. Such primeval galaxies, further, keeps merging together in the interior of clusters and vast clouds of gas, as the formation of stars is increased. Such a chaos, eventually, after a long story of 4.5 billion years, comes to an end, with the galaxies as we know them today -elliptical, spiral, irregular, just settling -as they keep flying apart. The motion of spacetime, as it should tend to slow, amazingly is increasing 7 billion years ago due to the famed 'dark energy' which, until now, is remaining of an unknown nature
Generally, our own Galaxy, the 'Galaxy' -or the 'Milky Way Galaxy', does belong to that logics, although appearing relatively early, about 10 billion years ago, as the Universe is populated of primordial galaxies only. 
It's not until 5.5 billion years later that our Sun and the solar system appear. Our Sun was born 4.6 billion years ago along with its trail of planets. The way it forms is just an usual process in the Universe -albeit with hues or differences- with a star forming from a cloud of dust and gas in a few hundreds of thousands of years, and the remaining of the cloud settling in its equatorial plane under the form of a disk. It's that disk of dust that the planets form in turn, as particules of dust agglomerate into aggregates. Such aggregates keep aggregating until they are heavy enough to have a density capable of attracting more matter. The star's radiation, then, just pushes the gas and the water vapor away from the center of the disk, just leaving there rocks and water. This brings to the difference between rocky planets -like the Earth or Mercury, and the gas giants -like Jupiter or Saturn. Some 20 million years, and the planets have been born
Once the first stage of the formation of planets is over, inner, rocky planets go on to transform, as gravity and density eventually bring the inside of them to melt, then to get layered. The lightest materials eventually cool and form a crust as the heat is evacuated, forming an atmosphere. Most of the rocky planets in our solar system endured, on the other hand, at that point of their evolution, a heavy bombardment by the leftovers of the formation. Asteroids and comets just came slamming at the surface. Each of the inner planets, after that, just followed its peculiar pathway, like Mars which lost its atmosphere, or Venus where the climate ran mad and enshrouded the planet under a heavy layer of clouds
Of all the planets and moons of the Solar System, it's at Earth that life appeared only. Life is something common in the Universe, as soon as the early beginnings. The building blocks of life are found among the elements released by the first generation stars. Such elements, then, are spreaded everywhere, from the gas and dust clouds to the planetary disks from which the planets form. 
Until now, however, life has been found appearing and developing at Earth only! Life at Earth amazingly appears from the very beginnings, about 400 million years after our planet formed. Such forms of life are obviously fit to the extreme conditions existing at that time. Very first bacteriae are breathing the hydrogen or the methane. Such primitive forms of life, in turn, as part of their cycle of life, are releasing the oxygen into the Earth's atmosphere. This brings to that oxygen-breathing, unicellular organisms appear at Earth 2.2 billion years later. 200 hundred million more years, and that's the fusion of the two genomes of those new forms of life, giving rise to the advanced forms of cells. Life borrows its cell operating systems from one form of life as it takes its information-carrying genes from another type! It's that advanced complexity which, 1.8 billion years ago, allows the multi-cellular forms of life. As life remains at that stage of the evolution during 1.2 billion years, under the form of the marine algae, the first 'invertebrates', that is the first animals, like worms or molluscs eventually appear. It takes 300 million years to have those animals to reach land, 400 million years ago only. Vegetation there allows to the vertebrates, like the fishes, the reptiles, and the dinosaurs, which feed on them. Large reptiles and dinosaurs eventually become the prominent form of life at Earth. Dinosaurs come to disappear 65 million years ago during one those mass extinctions which punctuate the history of life on our planet
The end of the dinosaurs makes room for the development of the mammals. Mammals become the dominant form of life. A mammal variety, the primates -which are specially able to social life, from one of their branches, gives birth to the monkeys and apes. From one of these branches in turn, a common ancestor to the great apes of Africa and to men appears 7 million years ago. One million years more and the Australopiths, a species of apes, have the bipedalism for its primary form of locomotion although retaining the aptitude to live in trees. It takes 2 million years more to have the real species 'Homo'. The 'Homo habilis' comes out from various kinds of Australopiths, as Homo habilis and the Australopiths cohabitate until 1.2 million years ago, when the Australopiths disappear. Homo habilis has a larger brain as it's the first to use tools intensively. It's from a variety of Homo habilis that 'Homo erectus' springs 1.9 million years ago. Home erectus is making use of shelters, of more advanced stone tools, as he might have invented fire. The first human groups, at that time, have already, 1.7 million years ago, gone out of Africa. They likely followed the large meat-eating animals -like the lions- the preys of which they were scavenging. 'Homo heidelbergensis' is another form of 'Homo', at last. It is found in Europe, 800,000 years ago only
'Homo sapiens', that is the most modern form of man -me, you, just comes then, 700,000 years ago. His brain is larger still than that of Homo erectus. Appearing with Homo sapiens are transitional species, like the Neandertals which exist between 200,000 and 28,000 years from now. It's Homo sapiens who really develops a culture, as he burries his dead, and has rituals. He is hunting, he uses fire. He's an artist. He uses the language and he enhances its tools. During 200,000 years, Homo sapiens is living along with the last Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis. It's along such a 700,000-year span of time that most of the evolution of the human brain is occurring, mainly due to the challenges of the environment. An increase in the pace of the advance of culture occurs between 90,000 and 50,000 years ago. Man, then, invented fishing. He's now painting on the walls of its caves, or he's able to make clothes. Art and tools are improved still. It seems like scientists, now, think that, through tens of millenia, beginning about 35,000 B.C., the gatherers-hunters groups got out of the bestiality through the matriarchy. Women in the group had it getting out of the bestiality through the mystery of the maternity. The certitude being only from what mother a child had been born from, it's that power -and the control related to the raising of little children- which allowed women to pacify and structure the clan, to a better survival. Those groups had a form of equality between women and men, as the superiority was recognized to women based on the religiosity which was surrounding the maternity
It's likely that Homo sapiens, in those pacified communities, one day, took note of how seeds, which were falling around the fireplace at the camp, were having plants growing the next season, and that his ability to culture had him taking at the camp some offspring of wild beasts. That gradually took man to another major step. 10,000 years ago, man worked out agriculture. This occurred in three places on Earth simultaneously. In the Middle East, on the banks of the Indus (present Pakistan), and those of the Yellow River, China. Mankind just stops to makes its living from hunting, and gathering naturally-grown products. Man becomes a farmer, as he grows crops and tends domesticated animals. He now lives in villages, where potters and basket-makers provide for the containers used to store harvest, as risly merchants travel far abroad to bring back the rare stones and metals used for tools and weapon-making. This is called the 'Neolithic Revolution'! Along some millennia, villages turn into cities, as the cities into empires. Such city-states and empires are seen ruling the world until about 750 B.C. as the agricultural revolution now has reached most of the continents and the parts of them. A major evolution took place about 3000 B.C. however, when the matriarcal societies were destroyed by the coming of the patriarcal people. Paradoxically, such societies themselves -albeit the phenomenon is still ill-known- began by being matriarcal too, with she-priests and shamans, with men eventually taking back the power in the groups
Three cultural basins are animating the Eurasia then, between 750 B.C. and about 500 A.D., in China, India, and the Mediterranean world. It's Greeks and the Romans who defeat the old empires along the Mediterranean shores, with new ideas of man, or with the military might as Alexander the Great conquers Persia. When the Roman empire comes to decline and fall in the 4th and 5th centuries, it's in the westernmost part of it that the European civilization finds its way based on the fusion between the German warriors, the existing people, and Christendom. As Europe reaches its height in the Middle Ages, it then mutates due to the great voyages of discovery of Columbus or the Portugueses and, after that still, to the Industrial Revolution. Europe, during such centuries, is enlarging its presence to the whole world, as, everywhere, farming is abandoned to the profit of factories, railways, and nations. The neolithic revolution lets place to the industrial society, likely determining a new step of the history of man
The varied industrial models came to enter in competition with each other as they had generated each, too, their socialism, that way to find a solution to the poverty of the masses. What the ultimate fate of mankind and the Universe will be, no one knows. We just know that the Universe appeared from a quantum fluctuation 14 billion years ago, in a balanced, everlasting cosmos. That, through renewing processes of aggregation and merger, the Universe and life unfolded, as mankind, at last -the last element in this history of billion years, appeared some 5 million years ago. As far as the Universe is concerned, on the other hand, some more advanced theories state that this underlying, primitive cosmos which gave birth to our Universe, might have give birth to many of them! This kind of quantum fluctuation which yielded our Universe is said to have happened again and again, bringing to that our huge Universe might just be one among hosts, and those would lie out of our knowledge forever. Each of those Universes would have its own set of natural laws and rules, just like a pure fantasy, or fun, of God or of Nature. Once the Special and General Relativity developed, Einstein spent its last 30 years to look for a 'theory of everything', a theory of the unified field which would have been able to 'read the mind of God'. It's likely that, should those theories of the 'multiverses' prove of interest, or true, trying to understand such Universes, which are the subjects of novel laws, might lead man further into the knowledge of himself and the world...
Website Manager: G. Guichard, site 'Amateur Astronomy,' http://stars5.6te.net. Page Editor: G. Guichard. last edited: 12/28/2010. contact us at ggwebsites@outlook.com