The rebellion of the molecules

The manual is a brief biography of the visible matter, which was considered eternal and static until less than a century ago, but the advance of the current scientific knowledge has enabled to develop a coherent narrative about its origin and evolutionary transformations.

The narrative begins with the birth of visible matter around 14 billion years ago, after what is known as the Big Bang, a huge flash that originated the universe. The matter formed was composed just by the nuclei of the two smallest atoms, hydrogen and helium.

As the pair of atoms was sterile – chemically speaking – started a long period of infancy, in which the pair of new-born atoms gave rise to gaseous clouds that began to form the first stars, authentic factories where the hundred existing chemical elements were manufactured.

After a few billion years, the stars began to end up their fuel, fading and disintegrating, seeding space with their precious cargo of new atoms, the so- called “stardust”. The new atoms formed in the stars began to form chemical compounds, in such a way that the already fertile matter entered in its adolescent phase.

Around 4.5 billion years ago, the gaseous clouds in a corner of the Milky Way galaxy formed a star – the Sun -, with a few planets revolving around. On one of them, the Earth, a few chemical compounds basically made up of atoms of four chemical elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen), started to evolve over hundreds of millions of years, through processes of chemical nature. Once the planet was transformed in a world of highly complex chemical molecules of inert nature, a singular group of complex molecules rebelled against its fate (the thermodynamic equilibrium, with the cessation of its activities). On the contrary, the rebel chemical molecular system self-organised its activities, transforming into a biological system, which was the first living organism. With the emergence of life began the adult phase of the visible matter.

The first consolidated living being on Earth, an imaginary creature smaller than a bacterium, is supposed to have been the common ancestor of all living beings, our umpteensquillionth-great-great-grandfather. By biological evolution over 4 billion years, all species on Earth, including humans, have emerged.

From LUCA, by biological evolution over nearly 4 billion years years, all species on Earth have emerged, including the human, supposedly the most evolved due to the complexity and organization of the material that composes it, capable of supporting highly specialized functions as is human consciousness. The manual is completed with a brief review from other levels of organization of matter beyond living beings, like ecosystems or planet Earth itself.

The title of the manual refers to the formation of the first living being, supposedly from a chemical system made up of molecules complexes that "rebelled" by not following the script provided by the laws of the nature that would have brought them to chemical equilibrium, a state in which the matter accommodates itself and tends to cease its activity. The Rebel Set molecular, already as a biological system, self-organized to maintain itself away from the paralyzing thermodynamic equilibrium, by means of a sustained supply of energy.

Despite beginning to evolve 13.8 billion years ago, the vast majority of visible matter remains unchanged forming the pair of atoms primal, and only a very small part has escalated to more evolved, forming compounds of inanimate nature contained in interstellar space and forming celestial bodies, apart from the stars. Presumably, the matter that forms living beings constitutes an infinitesimal part of the visible matter of the universe.