Mr. Moderate

Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

There are many barriers that mankind cannot cross and return. Hamlet (above) referred to the barrier between life and death. Billions of years ago, the first living things on Earth arose. Since that time, none have died and returned to life so far as science is concerned; at least none for which a sufficiently-loose definition of the word “died” is applied. True death must mean more than mere sleep or hibernation. Some species plant their seeds and disappear for many years, only to reappear on cue when their time comes around once again. Such life-forms are not truly “dead” in the sense implied by the above verses.

And thus this discussion illuminates the true philosophical problem, which is dissolved through linguistic analysis. What we mean by the very word “death” is that the living being is not returning in any identifiable form as an equivalently-living being. To turn this around, if there ever was a “resurrection,” then the death was not “real” in at least this particular sense. The very act of returning to life proves that the living thing was not truly dead in the first instance.

In a previous essay, I discussed the impossibly-large size of our current space-time continuum (or “universe” in a somewhat narrower sense than I usually mean to use that term). No human knows just how large this space-time continuum actually is. We have a mathematical formula that gives us an estimate, but we have no way to test the truth of that estimate and therefore no way to produce a better formula that yields a better result. In other words, we have no way we can “do science” on the problem of how big our space-time continuum actually is.

Let us think ourselves to be passengers on a spaceship which is capable of traveling at a speed just slightly less than the speed of light. So, for all practical purposes, if we leave the Earth and head in any direction that strikes our fancy, in what appears to be almost no time at all for ourselves, we reach a point about 13.5 billion light years away from the Earth, which is the current limit of what our present telescopes can see. If we stop there and look back at the Earth, we will see light which left the Earth only a short bit after we ourselves left the Earth. We will also see almost the same view in that same direction that scientists on Earth were seeing at the time we left the Earth. In that direction, time has stood still, based upon the light signals we can observe behind us.

If we look in the opposite direction, away from the Earth, we would be able to see light that is roughly 27 billion light years away and old (at the same time). This will be virtually the same cosmic background radiation that Earth-designed instruments of today can view, except it will be twice as old in all directions around our current observation point. You see, while we were traveling away from the Earth at nearly the speed of light, time had progressed very little for ourselves, but from the standpoint of the universe as a whole, it is now an additional 13.5 billion years old. As the limits on what we can observe are strictly set by the age of the universe, we have gained something from our time and space travels, but not nearly enough to be able to observe the truth about the space-time continuum within which we now live.

But sitting there in space, 13.5 billion light years from where we started (on Earth), we will know one thing with a very high degree of certainty: even though we can see the light from the Sun (or at least, from the Milky Way galaxy), we will know that the Sun shall have exploded and destroyed the Earth during our 13.5 billion year journey to get where we are at that moment in time. (In theory, from where we sit right now reading this writing, the Sun has about 5 billion more years worth of fuel before it explodes. So, it is pretty clear that after 13.5 billion years, the Earth is toast.)

Now, the volume of space we can see goes up as the cube of the radius. If we call 13.5 billion light years “1 UU” (one universe unit), then the volume of space we can see from Earth today is “1 UVU” (one universe volume unit). Given that scale, from our vantage point 1 UU away from where the Earth was, the volume we can see is the cube of 2 times 13.5 billion light years, or a total of 8 UVU. However, according to my previous article, scientists believe that the size of the space-time continuum within which we live is roughly 10,000 UVU, so we have a ways to go before we can hope to see “it all.”

So, we put our near-light-speed ship into motion again and proceed on until we have covered an additional distance of 14 UU (which would be an additional 189 billion light years of distance) and we stop again. The space-time continuum within which we live is now 216 billion Earth years old (although the Earth is now a totally-forgotten memory for anybody not in our vehicle), and we can point our most powerful telescope in any direction and view up to 16 UU away in any direction, which is a volume of 4,096 UVU. Now, we are starting to make a dent in our original goal to be able to view the entire space-time continuum so that we could see what it is we are actually living within.

But we are running up against two other issues. First, while our original estimate of the size of the space-time continuum at the age of about 13.5 billion Earth years was roughly 10,000 UVU, in the intervening 200 billion years or so, the volume has obviously increased. And second, I don’t know of many scientists who believe there will be any stars at all still shining 200 billion Earth years into our future, so we may well be running out of time as far as our ability to actually observe anything might go.

Nonetheless, we’ve come this far, so we head out an additional 16 UU in the same direction, where we ought to be able to observe a radius of 32 UU in all directions as our space-time continuum is now roughly 432 billion Earth years old. If there is anything still there for us to see (and there certainly should be, as we have been traveling along in parallel with the light emitted by the Earth’s own Sun), we should be able to observe a total volume of about 32,768 UVU, which is sufficiently larger than the original goal of 10,000 UVU that we may well say that we have finally found our place to observe the size and nature of our own space-time continuum (or “universe” if you prefer).

Modern science does not even have a good theory as to what (if anything) an observer who could make such a trip might discover. But if you have to go out at nearly the speed of light for roughly 400 billion Earth years before you could hope to be able to observe the entirety of our space-time continuum, then it is likely that space-time will have ended before you get to the point where you can make any sort of valid observations of that sort. And we clearly have no clue as to what it might mean if our space-time continuum “ended” in that fashion. We only have one space-time continuum with which we are familiar, and we can only make observations about most of the first 13 billion Earth years of its history. Attempting to extrapolate that out to roughly 400 billion Earth years is an exercise in speculation which is fraught with danger.

Thus, it is my personal view that it is not only the undiscovered country, it is the undiscoverable country!