In episode 2 of the Cosmic Connection, LPPFusion Chief Scientist Eric Lerner begins to discuss what knowledge can be gained by looking at the evolution of the universe that can help to understand what is going on now, on earth, in social evolution. Is the current global crisis the sign of a world slipping into chaos, the first steps towards a new Dark Age? Or are they the symptoms of a form of society that has reached its limits, the symptoms of the need for a new way of running society that can lead to a new renaissance and an enormously better life for all humanity? How can cosmology help to answer this question?

If there was no Big Bang, how and where do we start the story of the universe? There really is no beginning, but the earliest stage of evolution we have evidence for is the formation of the vast ancient structures we observe—superclusters of cluster of galaxies and even larger structures. In this episode, Lerner explains how these structures came into existence over trillions of years through the interaction of three basic processes, all of which have been studied here on earth for centuries: the pinch effect, gravitational contraction and the disk-generator effect.

This podcast series is a companion to our video series “The Real Crisis in Cosmology”.