Life Is Infinite
The laws of nature cannot be randomly reshuffled at the cusps. If the universe has already gone through many oscillations, many possible laws of gravity would have been so weak that, for any given initial expansion, the universe would not have held together. Once the universe stumbles upon such a gravitation law, it flies apart and has no further opportunity to experience another oscillation and another cusp and another set of laws of nature.
Thus we can deduce from the fact that the universe exists either a finite age, or a severe restriction on the kinds of laws of nature permitted in each oscillation. If the laws of physics are not randomly reshuffled at the cusps, there must be a regularity, a set of rules, that determines which laws are permissible and which are not. Such a set of rules would comprise a new physics standing over the existing physics. Our language is impoverished; there seems to be no suitable name for such a new physics. Both “paraphysics” and “metaphysics” have been pre-emptied by other rather different and, quite possibly, wholly irrelevant activities. Perhaps “transphysics” would do.
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| Life Is Infinite. Credit photo: Elena |
Matter, gas, dust in the outskirts of galaxies, is not readily detected. It does not give off visible light to which our eyes are sensitive. Observatories in Earth orbit have found an intense X-ray glow between the galaxies. It was first thought to be hot intergalactic hydrogen, an immense amount of it never before seen, perhaps enough to close the Cosmos and to guarantee that we are trapped in an oscillation universe. But more recent observations by Ricardo Giacconi may have resolved the X-ray glow into individual points, perhaps an immense horde of distant quasars. They contribute previously unknown mass to the universe as well. When the cosmic inventory is completed, and the mass of all the galaxies, quasars, black holes, intergalactic hydrogen, gravitational waves and still more exotic denizens of space is summed up, we will know what kind of universe we inhabit.
In discussing the large-scale structure of the Cosmos, astronomers are fond of saying that space is curved, or that there is no center of the Cosmos, or that the universe is finite but unbounded.
Just sixty-five million years ago our ancestors were the most unprepossessing of mammals – creatures with the size and intelligence of moles or three shrews. It would have taken a very audacious biologist to guess that such animals would eventually produce the line that dominates the earth today. The Earth then was full of awesome, nightmarish lizards – the dinosaurs, immensely successful creatures, which filled virtually every ecological niche.There were swimming reptiles, flying reptiles, reptiles – some as tall as a six-story building, – thundering across the face of the Earth.
Some of them had rather large brains, a upright posture and two little front legs very much like hands, which they used to catch small, speedy mammals – probably including our distant ancestors – for dinner. If such dinosaurs had survived, perhaps the dominant intelligent species on our planet today would be four meters tall with green skin and sharp teeth, and the human form would be considered a lurid fantasy of saurian science fiction. But the dinosaurs did not survive. In one catastrophic event all of them and many, perhaps most, of the other species on the Earth, were destroyed (Analysis suggest that 96% of all the species in the oceans may have died at that time. With such an enormous extinction rate, the organisms of today can have evolved from only a small and unrepresentative sampling of the organisms that lived in late Mesozoic times).
If things had been a little different, it might have been some other creature whose intelligence and manipulative ability would have led to comparable accomplishments.
If the things had been a little different, it might have been some other creature whose intelligence and manipulative ability would have led to comparable accomplishments. Perhaps the smart bipedal dinosaurs, or the raccoons, or the otters, or the squid. It would be nice to know how different other intelligences can be; so we study the whales and the great aps. To learn a little about what other kinds of civilizations are possible, we can study history and cultural anthropology. But we are all of us – us whales, us apes, us people – too closely related. As long as our inquiries are limited to one or two evolutionary lines on a single planet, we will remain forever ignorant of the possible range and brilliance of other intelligences and other civilizations.
Dinosaur Red
We Survived
Just sixty-five million years ago our ancestors were the most unprepossessing of mammals – creatures with the size and intelligence of moles or three shrews. It would have taken a very audacious biologist to guess that such animals would eventually produce the line that dominates the earth today. The Earth then was full of awesome, nightmarish lizards – the dinosaurs, immensely successful creatures, which filled virtually every ecological niche.There were swimming reptiles, flying reptiles, reptiles – some as tall as a six-story building, – thundering across the face of the Earth.
Some of them had rather large brains, a upright posture and two little front legs very much like hands, which they used to catch small, speedy mammals – probably including our distant ancestors – for dinner. If such dinosaurs had survived, perhaps the dominant intelligent species on our planet today would be four meters tall with green skin and sharp teeth, and the human form would be considered a lurid fantasy of saurian science fiction. But the dinosaurs did not survive. In one catastrophic event all of them and many, perhaps most, of the other species on the Earth, were destroyed (Analysis suggest that 96% of all the species in the oceans may have died at that time. With such an enormous extinction rate, the organisms of today can have evolved from only a small and unrepresentative sampling of the organisms that lived in late Mesozoic times).
If things had been a little different, it might have been some other creature whose intelligence and manipulative ability would have led to comparable accomplishments.
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| Dinosaur Red. If things had been a little different, it might have been dinosaurs whose intelligence and abilities would have led to rein. Image: © Megan Jorgensen |
Most of the species were destroyed. But not the tree shrews. Not the mammals. They survived.
If the things had been a little different, it might have been some other creature whose intelligence and manipulative ability would have led to comparable accomplishments. Perhaps the smart bipedal dinosaurs, or the raccoons, or the otters, or the squid. It would be nice to know how different other intelligences can be; so we study the whales and the great aps. To learn a little about what other kinds of civilizations are possible, we can study history and cultural anthropology. But we are all of us – us whales, us apes, us people – too closely related. As long as our inquiries are limited to one or two evolutionary lines on a single planet, we will remain forever ignorant of the possible range and brilliance of other intelligences and other civilizations.
Dinosaur Red
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