We all know the universe came from the Big Bang, but how exactly did that happen? How did the energy from the Big Bang produce matter, for instance? How did the first stars and planets form? This video explains all that simply. And rather than giving a timeline of the different eras and epochs, like the Planck epoch, the Electroweak epoch, etc. I simply state what happened and how, clearly and without using too much scientific jargon. This video does not get too deep into the science, and I don’t talk about topics like the fundamental forces and dark matter, which will only confuse most people. This is just a general overview of where everything basically came from.

Script:

"So, there was the Big Bang. Space was rapidly expanding and at first, the only things that existed were fluctuations in the quantum field. In quantum fluctuations, pairs of subatomic particles and anti-particles appear and then come together and annihilate each other. They just do that. Everywhere in space, there are particles and anti-particles appearing, running into each other, and disappearing, randomly, all the time. Even now that’s always going on. Eventually, the regular particles outnumbered the anti-particles, and that’s how we got electrons, protons, and neutrons. This all happened less than 1 second after the Big Bang. Since the early stage of the universe was extremely hot and dense (about 160,000× hotter than our sun), these particles were moving around very fast for hundreds of thousands of years, colliding with each other, and fusing into atoms, mostly hydrogen and helium since those are the smallest. Huge clouds of hydrogen and helium were pulled together by gravity, and the more these atoms clustered together, the stronger the gravity became. After 250 million years of this, they formed extremely large spheres of gas so massive that the pressure crushed the gas in the center, causing nuclear fusion and creating the first stars. These stars fused the hydrogen and helium atoms in their cores to create heavier elements like nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, sodium, sulfur, iron, silver, mercury, and many others. Some of these stars then exploded in supernovae, which scattered the new elements out into space. Oxygen atoms that came into contact with hydrogen atoms fused together to create water vapor, which then cooled and froze into chunks of ice.

So at that point, there was all this space junk floating around all over the universe. A lot of it just collected around stars, due to the stars’ gravity, forming rings of dust and rocks. Gravity eventually pulled the dust and rocks together, forming rocky planets like earth. These planets were constantly bombarded by meteors because again, there was all that space junk floating around. A lot of those meteors were those frozen chunks of ice. On the planets like earth that were orbiting near their star, the ice from the meteorites melted, covering the planets in water. The presence of water on earth, along with hydrogen, methane, and ammonia, produced complex organic compounds like amino acids, the building blocks of life."