Let There Be Light
Imagine that you're a disembodied eye floating in the darkness of space, surrounded by a vast ocean of gas and exceedingly fine dust. Now watch those two dust grains nearest you: they're ever so slowly moving toward each other. Gravitational attraction is weak when the masses are small, but it's always present no matter the scale. Eventually, some of the nearby grains get close enough to orbit each other in a loose ball. Once that happens, the local concentration of mass becomes a gravitational magnet for nearby grains. More and yet more grains start drifting toward the tiny ball. As they start to orbit it, the local force of gravity grows larger and larger.As the local attraction increases, more grains fall in, until the local force grows so strong that other balls of loosely coupled grains start drifting into the growing mass. It's like watching a slow-motion video of water whirlpooling down a drain. The bigger the ball, the bigger it gets. The bigger it gets, the faster it grows. What was once two tiny grains circling each other simply grows and grows until it's as big as a rock, then a planet, then tens of thousands of planets. As the huge ball compresses under the force of gravity, its core temperature eventually heats up to a few hundred thousand degrees and it becomes a superhot plasma.
More quickly now, the plasma gets hotter and hotter, and denser and denser, until the core temperature passes a few million degrees. The enormous heat and gravity then fuse the dense plasma in its very heart, and a thermonuclear fusion reaction begins. A lot of exciting things now happen very quickly. The fusion in the core radiates enormous quantities of energy. The high temperatures and the continuing fusion encourage more and yet more plasma to fuse in a nuclear chain reaction. The enormous outward pressures from the massive amounts of energy being released prevent the outer shell from falling into the inner core and the huge ball stops shrinking. The fusion reaction is now self-sustaining. The ball of once-dead matter ignites and becomes a sun.
We seem headed for our own starbirth, drawn to it just as inexorably as those grains merge, accelerating toward it just as surely as the merging accelerates. The attraction is massive, relentless, unstoppable. When our starbirth comes, some of us will no longer be truly human; and things we now call machines will no longer truly be machines.
Trembling on the Brink