The Big Bang Tango Challenge

  Your challenge is just a small one, should you choose to accept it (if not this page will pucker its pixels with disappointment in five seconds). Below are verses on the saga of this cosmos--starting with the Big Bang and ending with the emotions flicking through your brain as you read these words. Some of these verses go a bit beyond and probe the future on a trans-galactic scale.

We of the Big Bang Tango Media Lab have made animations and music to these words. Our goal is to make science sing. Our goal is to demonstrate that we--you and I--have been thrown a cosmic dare--to make this a better world, a world with warmth, compassion, delight and surprise. A warmth based on a clearer insight into our own nature--an insight based on science and on evolutionary history.

We have met our savior, and it is us. It is time for us to rise and do our work. It is time to turn a cruel universe just. It is time to do what mother nature has dared us to do--it is time to overcome her violence while understanding and muliplying her creativity.

If you could have any vision you wanted on the web, what would it be? If you could hear any music you wanted, how would you make this cosmos sing? If you can do it in a way that gives new meaning to the lyrics below, by all means do. Make your vision and send it. If we like it we will put it on the Big Bang Tango Media Lab gallery page.

Who knows. We may also invite you to join us in what we do.

Here are the lyrics in current form:

Attraction and Repulsion

Love and the birth of a universe,
What are they all about?
Attraction and repulsion.
The gathering in.
The pushing to get out.
The binding of atoms.
The breaking of hearts.
The needs that bring us together,
The needs that tear us apart.

It's time to dance the big bang tango.
Hold hands. Pull together.
Get angry, spin away.
Chase and catch each other.
Then burst apart again.
Hug tight, spin, and separate.
Attraction and repulsion.
Repeat the two. Reiterate.

The Big Bang was repulsion
taken to the nth degree.
A glowing point spurt from the nothing,
swelling at hyperspeed
Yet in the rush to separate,
attraction showed its greed.
Electrons, quarks, and photons
tugged themselves together
from the blast of energy.
Electrons, quarks, and photons-
these were the cosmic seeds.

It's time to dance the big bang tango.
Hold hands. Pull together.
Spit anger, spin away.
Chase and catch each other.
Then slam apart again.
Hug tight, spin, and separate.
Attraction and repulsion.
Repeat the two. Reiterate.

Three hundred thousand years later
the sprint slowed down considerably.
Atoms came together
drawn by inanimate need.
Moseying electrons
felt a magnetic lure.
They settled into orbit
Around proton-neutron cores.
Yet even in these atoms
that attraction's power made,
repulsion kept electrons
Hovering at bay.

Then came the attractive force
we know as gravity,
gathering the stuff of dust,
of nebulae, and galaxies.
Yet even here some rebels
kept their distance, stayed apart.
Spinning hard in spiral arms
they shunned the galactic heart.

It's time to dance the big bang tango.
Hold hands. Pull together.
Spit anger, spin away.
Chase and catch each other.
Then hurl apart again.
Hug tight, spin, and separate.
Attraction and repulsion.
Repeat the two. Reiterate.

Nearly four billion years ago,
on a planet still brand new,
life-stuff came together
and life did its tango too-
attraction and repulsion,
the dance of join-and-separate.

Our foremothers were bacteria-a hugging, clinging bunch.
Yet they had to move apart
when it came time to munch.
Trillions squeezed together in a single colony.
But every time their food ran out,
they massed to march and separate,
spreading to find new feed.

It's time to dance the big bang tango.
Hold hands. Pull together.
Get angry, spin away.
Chase and catch each other.
Then shoot apart again.
Hug tight, spin, and separate.
Attraction and repulsion.
Repeat the two. Reiterate.

Then along came humans,
tango masters incarnate.
Love pulls us together,
Then in spats we separate.
Attraction and repulsion.
We do it as tribes and nations.
We do it when we mate.

We are the big bang's children.
We are columns of the dust
The cosmos twisted 'round our sun.
Our blood runs red with iron forged
In fires of exploding stars
after their course was run.
Each cell of your hand, or eye, or brain
Is a team of atoms gathered from a star
the big bang's womb once made.

We dance the big bang tango-
attract, repulse, reiterate.
Love each other, fear each other, come together,
argue, hate.

It's time to dance the big bang tango.
Hold hands. Pull together.
Get angry, spin away.
Chase and catch each other.
Then burst apart again.
Hug tight, spin, and separate.
Attraction and repulsion.
Repeat the two. Reiterate.

Love and the birth of a universe,
What are they all about?
Attraction and repulsion.
The gathering in.
The pushing to get out.
The binding of atoms.
The breaking of hearts.
The needs that bring us together,
The needs that tear us apart.

Galactic Larvae In A Hive

Horizons are within us,
yearning to break free
to soar from fires in our souls
from flames of our imaginings
to forge the goals that beckon us
to reinvent reality.

We have a mission to create,
for we're the cosmos incarnate.
We're evolution self-aware,
her frontal lobes and fingertips.
We are star stuff come alive
Galactic larvae in a hive.
We're parts of something very old,
but very young in cosmic time.
We're neurons of our planet
We are interspecies mind.

Could swarms of robo-microbes
Made by humans and biology
The techno teams
That come from dreams
The wet dreams of technology

Could cyborg microbes by the trillions
Launched as space communities
Explore the dark beyond our skies
Thrive on starlight, climb and dive
through wormholes and through nebulae?
Could they re-landscape Einstein's space
And tame time with phrenology?

Could they ride herd
on mass stampedes
of x-rays and raw energy
corraling flares spat by black holes
at the cores of galaxies?

Could genes retooled
In swarms of cells
Become our new conquistadores?
Could they explore
Galactic shores
And synapse reports
To our brains?

From global thinking
Could we go
To cosmos-hopping megaminds
One small step for E. coli
A giant step for human kind?

Horizons are within us,
yearning to break free
to soar from fires in our souls
from flames of our imaginings
to forge the goals that beckon us
to reinvent reality.

We have a mission to create,
for we're the cosmos incarnate.
We're evolution self-aware,
her frontal lobes and fingertips.
We are star stuff come alive
Galactic larvae in a hive.

We're parts of something very old,
but young in cosmic time.
We're neurons of our planet
We are interspecies mind.

- Howard Bloom -