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All is well -- Splat!

Reader comment on item: Musing on History
in response to reader comment: the Great Balancing Act

Submitted by Michael S (United States), Jul 12, 2015 at 03:56

Hi, Waz. You said,

Right - and where to look for this 'balance'? The irony is that it's always been inside us. Can it ever have been anywhere else? The lack of balance is there causing chaos in our lives- but underlying it all is that point of peace and stillness. That's what we seek. It's useless trying to arrange the world in order to try to find it - as it was never there.

Here are the ways I see the universe as "out of whack":

  1. The universe seems to be accelerating in its expansion from the hypothetical "singularity". With no external force to cause it to contract back into itself. this makes the whole world seem like a happenstance. In the great scheme of things, under these conditions, there is a vanishingly small chance of our ever having occupied our current location. Put another way, this makes it seem that the probability that we exist is essentially zero.
  2. Time is philosophically limitless in one direction (forward); but it goes back, as far as we can understand it, only to the Big Bang. Is there a "mirror" universe going timewise into the opposite direction, on the other side of the Big Bang? We can postulate that it exists, but can never prove it.
  3. We are moving as a unit with 100,000,000,000 or more stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. This, along with some near neighbors, is our "inertial frame of reference", if I understand correctly. The stars in this unit will never move away from us, so far as I know; but the stars and galaxies outside of our inertial unit are all moving away from us, and will eventually be moving away so fast that their light never reaches us. This means that whereas we currently live in an "expanding universe", at some time in the distant future we will not have any more evidence of such an expansion. A civilization begun in the future, therefore, will never come up with the "Big Bang" Theory. What makes anyone believe, then, that this theory, which seems to explain our current existence, would have been valid had we existed, say, a few moments after the Big Bang? Would we been one of myriads of such singularities? What would our theory of origins have been then?

In all this, we seem like the man jumping off the top of a 100 storey building, who was heard when zooming past the 50th floor, to be saying,

"Everything seems to be normal. No need to worry!"

It leads one to wonder when the great consequential "Splat!" will happen. We think that way, because in this small universe of ours that we can observe, things flying around freely and randomly, as our existence seems to be doing, eventually do smack into something. We are therefore philosophically prepared by nature to hope that the intelligence that created us and our world will also be waiting to catch us with a safety net. Without the existence of such a nurturing Life, there is no reasonable explanation for us to be here: If we were just randomly hurled from something into nothingness by a god whom perhaps we should call "Chaos", then Chaos will very soon run out of "somethings" to play with. Does that seem sensible to you?

Good night.

Submitting....

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