5 Mind-Blowing Scientific Answers to Life's 'Big Questions'

The Theory:

For the moment, we're going to pretend that we actually have the ability to explain this in a way that is not insane.

Back in Einstein's day, Big Al and his colleagues discovered a problem: The laws of physics didn't seem to work once you got on a subatomic scale. In fact, even today, no one has been able to marry Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum physics, and not for lack of trying. One attempt you might have heard of is string theory, which simply suggests that once you get smaller than an atom, everything is a string. Specifically, a 2-D unit called a quantum string. So far, so good? FANTASTIC.

Now. String theorists think that everything we see, feel, hear, touch, taste and screw is nothing more than the vibration of those strings, a theory so far out there that string theorists are known as the Cheeches and Chongs of the physics world. Holographic universers took that theory further by suggesting that maybe, just maybe, everything we feel, hear, touch, taste and screw could be a 3-D projection of cosmic data encoded on a 2-D surface.

Kind of like the hologram you see on a credit card, if that hologram had entire civilizations, all of human history and the entire universe living inside it.

And believe it or not, people are putting money into proving this bong hit of a theory. A million dollars, to be exact. Craig Hogan, a physicist from Illinois, is building two holometers. Their job is to monitor the smallest spaces in our universe and look for pixelation in the fabric of space and time. In the same way that people can identify digital quality by spotting the pixels, Hogan thinks he can spot the blurriness in reality by finding Planck units, theoretical units of space, time and mass so teensy that they're pretty much impossible to detect. Here's what Hogan says:

"What we're looking for is when the lasers lose step with each other. We're trying to detect the smallest unit in the universe. This is really great fun, a sort of old-fashioned physics experiment where you don't know what the result will be."

So if we're reading that right, as we speak, a scientist from Illinois is gathering data to determine whether the entire universe has been Photoshopped.

A competing group of researchers say they aren't finding this theoretical pixelation so far, which would suggest maybe the theory isn't right after all. But holy shit, just the fact that there are multiple teams all taking this seriously enough to try to get precise measurements on it kind of makes our heads hurt.

All right, so that's the universe. But how did we wind up with this weird, self-replicating substance we call life? Science says that to understand it, you need to dig up some old heavy metal album covers.

Looking back on it now, it does seem pretty weird that metal albums used to have such a big hard-on for lightning ...

... and volcanoes ...

... or both ...

... often with dragons, warrior women or mutilated corpses sprinkled in for good measure, just in case you had any doubts that what you were about to listen to was hardcore. Why musicians thought acts of nature were synonymous with guitar-driven rock, we'll never know. But maybe those metalheads were on to something, because hidden somewhere in that badass imagery are the building blocks of life.

The Theory:

In the beginning, there were volcanoes, volcanic lightning and a few basic chemicals from which all life began. No word yet on the dragons.

Discovering this took an experiment that spanned half a century. It started the 1950s, when University of Chicago professor Stanley Miller was trying to figure out how inorganic particles could turn into organic life (and eventually Marilyn Monroe's ass). In the most famous version of the Miller-Urey experiment, he combined chemicals that would have been present at the dawn of the Earth -- water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen -- in sterile flasks, then zapped them with electrodes, as if they had been hit by lightning.

After a week of zapping, cooling, condensing and starting all over again, Miller ended up with a couple of amino acids, the building blocks of protein and all of organic life. So no pyramids, just some half-baked bricks. But there was something missing in Miller's theory. Something awesome, like ... an angry volcano.

Fifty years after the original experiment, one of Miller's students found the original flasks and decided to do a little testing of his own. It turned out the electricity simulation experiment was only one of several tested in the lab. Miller had also simulated what would happen if those chemicals were swimming around near an active volcano. That flask yielded 22 amino acids, which were even more likely to become protein over time. Had those amino acids been touched by lightning, which is entirely likely because volcanoes and lightning go together like peas and carrots ...

.... Miller might have actually been able to get his Frankenstein on. By the way, we found a picture of him and one of his assistants while conducting their experiments. You're welcome.

But how did humans wind up so radically different from everything else on earth? After all, according to science, we share a whopping 96 to 98 percent of our DNA with chimps, but what a huge difference those little percentage points make. Out of that 4 percent we get Nikola Tesla, Teddy Roosevelt and Albert Einstein, as opposed to the most accomplished chimpanzee in the world, Charlie the smoking chimp. Suck it, apes! Your greatest hero was a tragic joke!

To become the pinnacles of evolution we are today (anti-vaccination advocates notwithstanding), we had to lose patches of our genetic code over the course of the last 5 million years. In other words, our humanness is as much about genetic errors as it is about anything else.

So what's missing? Smaller brains and spiked wieners, that's what. And yes, those two things are connected.

The Theory:

Recently scientists have found over 500 gene segments that are present in chimp DNA but absent from ours. And since we think that humans and chimps shared a common ancestor about 5 million years ago, we probably carried those chunks at some point. Once researchers isolated those segments, they made two interesting finds. One, we lost the gene halting the growth of brain cells, which is what helped gain our mega brains.

And two, we lost the spiked barbs that cover chimp dicks. Oh, you didn't know that chimp dicks have spines? Do a Google image search for close-ups of chimp dongs, you'll see them.

Thanks to their barbed schlongs, chimps are able to copulate fast and hard, with everyone getting to their happy place in no time, which is awesome for a species where one dude is expected to bang lots of ladies. With the loss of the "spiked for her pleasure" quality, however, our ancestors had to start boning longer, and when you spend that much time entangled in each other's junk, a special bond forms between you two. And that's how we got monogamy (and the fake orgasm).

That monogamy thing turned out to be great news for the increasingly smarter human offspring who, as you might remember, are born dumber than dirt. Those big human brains need longer to develop, which means longer periods of helplessness as infants, which means more dependence on two parents for a longer period of time, which is aided by a lack of barbed cocks.

After reading Shakespeare, or a poem by Yeats, or getting called a "fuck-boob whore" by a crazy hobo, it's only natural to marvel at the invention of language. How, in such a short period of time, did we possibly go from mutely hitting women on the head and hoping for the best to creating sounds meant to trick them into thinking we own a Ferrari?

The Theory:

Singing came first. Talking came second.

According to neuroscientist Dr. John Skoyle, singing had to come first, because all you need to sing is a mouth, vocal chords, some breath control and a big heart. Speech, on the other hand, requires vocabulary and syntax and a host of other complex brain and throat functions to work. In other words, singing is easy, which is why it's evolved dozens of times among dozens of different species. Speaking is hard, which is why it's only happened once.

According to Skoyle, Darwin and others, humans couldn't have learned to talk first, because singing prepped our vocal tracts to one day handle more complex sound formations, which eventually became words and dick jokes. Then, understanding intonation and repetitive patterns taught the early humans syntax, which was the last step on the road from rhythmic animal grunts to bona fide language.

So it only makes sense that humans figured out crooning before they figured out talking.

And so here we are. A species that can think and converse. But what about laughter? How did we start joking with one another?

After all, laughter is one of those things we take for granted as natural, but is weird as hell if you think about it. Why would we go into a spasm of uncontrollable verbal nonsense every time we see somebody accidentally hit themselves in the crotch by stepping on a rake?

It turns out that, like everything else in our evolution, it was literally a matter of life and death.

The Theory:

Before we laughed at fart jokes, droll puns or adorable kitties playing peekaboo, we laughed in relief that the noise in the bushes wasn't a saber-tooth tiger ready to rip our throats out.

To understand the origin of laughter we have to first define "humor." The most popular definition of humor is "incongruity" -- the state where something isn't quite right. It can be anything from a difference of expectations between a joke's build-up and the result (the punchline) or just general absurdity (an armadillo riding a scooter made out of dildos).

OK, but how about this: a guy marries his high school sweetheart and the next day he tortures her to death. That's definitely incongruous, but it's not really funny (unless he did it while wearing a Big Bird costume). So there's definitely something missing in this theory, and according to psychology professor Peter McGraw, that something is the key to laughter itself: safety.

According to McGraw and other researchers of humor (which is apparently a thing and no one fucking told us about it), if people don't feel safe and secure, then they won't laugh. And back during the early days of man, that is exactly what laughing was used for: to signal that the situation was under control.

Say our ancestors heard a rustle from the nearby bushes and one of them checked it out, only to find out it was just the wind. He would then laugh to tell everyone, "There are no tigers there, man, so chill." If he just said (or sang) it with a straight face, everyone would assume that he's lying to get a head start for the jungle as it feasted on the rest of the tribe. But with a "Ha ha ha, it was only Enlil, the wind god, fucking with us," everyone could relax and go back to lice picking.

So be sure to tune in tomorrow for more reassuring and safe laughs with Cracked, as we tell you about the 6 Deadliest Parasites That Live Inside Your Brain Right Now.

Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a freelance online writer and Japanese-English-Polish translator. If you pay him, he will write words for you. Contact him at c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com.

For more insane theories, check out 5 Scientific Theories That Will Make Your Head Explode and 6 Insane Fan Theories That Actually Make Great Movies Better.

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