starting with a bang

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According to science, as I understand it, the Universe began 13.7 billion years ago as a dot smaller than the smallest imaginable thing. There was a period of rapid expansion and then a long dark hot period of a few million years before the first protons formed from a boiling quark soup, then the first stars; I think maybe it was a bit like this but invisible:

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                                                                           'Dark Heat'

​There is a lot of debate about how the Universe came into being. If it came from nothing that would include time so without time there can be no beginning. According to General Relativity time and space are elastic, as time stretches space squashes and vice versa, like a cartoon animation.

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So when time squashes toward zero, space stretches toward infinity so no need to begin and end just get closer and closer to infinity and zero without ever getting there except when we encounter a black hole, but that's another story.  So it could be argued that the Universe can potentially be both infinite and finite.

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                                                                        'Alpha and Omega'

Theoretically before the hot fuzz of 'Dark Heat' there was a massive explosion, not thermonuclear like in 'Alpha and Omega' because as of yet there were no atoms so no nuclei.
There are two known types of nuclear energy, fission, splitting the atom and fusion, binding atomic nuclei. Fusion bombs release much larger amounts of energy than fission bombs.
The little circle in the drawing represents the 200 metre fireball diameter of the Nagasaki plutonium fission device 'Fat Man' and the big circle the 8,000 metre fireball diameter of the Soviet hydrogen fusion bomb 'Tsar Bomba' the largest human detonation in history.
While it may be theoretical that the Universe started with a big bang it is reasonably certain the World, as we know it, can end with one.
It is a sobering thought that we still have around 16,000 nuclear weapons on Earth most of them closer in power to the bigger example. Stanley Kubricks film  'Doctor Strangelove' imagines what would happen if.....​

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"You know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb".

'sometimes a cigar is just a cigar'

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The cigar has been associated with phallic alpha power since before Freud uttered that comment. With the dropping of the Atom Bomb at the end of World War Two the proud tradition of Imperial Japan was faced with the challenge of rising from the ashes. The post-apocalypse Sun of Japanese identity underwent a profound transformation expressed in the blending of traditional classical art with the cartoon visuals that had emerged from the USA across the Pacific. Manga and Anime are now dominant global iconographies. Films like Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira have been massively influential on international cinema and manga style characters are common currency across World culture; the offspring of Geisha and Mickey Mouse in a weaponised world.

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Traumatic events get mediated by Art in all its variations, enabling reconciliation and cultural fusion. This mixing generates new forms of expression.

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