Walking on Earth’s surface in places like the Grand Canyon, one can find rocks that are several billion years old. The simplest forms of bacterial life on Earth are about 3.5 billion years old, and our planet itself isn’t very much older, approximately 4.6 billion years. The big bang singularity theorem is saying that if we were to go back to a time just three times earlier—13.8 billion years ago—there would be no time, no space, no anything. Viewed this way, we are rather close to the beginning of everything.
