Reflections from a Lesser Star
We are living in the first breath of the universe.
Sometime soon, you will probably read that line in a story of mine. I’m currently obsessed with it, it will not stop rattling around in my brain, and that means it likely will not stop such rattling until I find the right place to put it in a story. Even then, it may recur, and it is keeps recurring long enough, I’ll have to tattoo it on my body before things feel right again and I can really release it. (I really, honestly do have low-grade symptoms of OCD, and this is hardly the only example.)
We are living in the first breath of the universe.
What does that mean? What is the history of that statement?
Well…
The universe, according to our best understanding, is about 14 Billion years old. (This is leaving aside questions of what existed before the Big Bang, which are interesting and possibly the subject of a future story, but is out of scope for this rumination.)
That is very old compared to, say, me. It is old compared to the age of the Egyptian Pyramids, or Dinosaur Fossils. It is even fairly old compared to the age of Earth, which is approximately 4.5 Billion years old.
It has always seemed strange to me, though, that the Universe is only ~3x the age of the Earth. It’s not clear why that should be the case. Planets last a long time, but not nearly so long as universes.
That last sentence is an understatement. Like, a big understatement. In fact, if you examine the “Timeline of the Far Future” Wikipedia Article, which I encourage you to do and I do regularly, you will notice that:
All neutrons in the visible universe will take a number of years equal to a one followed by one hundred zeroes (pronunciation not available). This is a sum of time so unimaginable that any analogy is, by definition, inadequate.
After that, the universe will still exist, but will be a formless void, for hundreds of orders of magnitude more years than that. The number of years is a 1 followed by more zeroes than a human being could even *read* in their lifetime.
Universes live a long time.
And yet we live in the first 14 Billion years of ours. That’s 14,000,000,000. It’s a long number, but it took you only a moment to read it.
If our universe were a child it is still being born, with only the first couple of cells of its head thus far emerging into the world, and we are riding along on one of those cells. (And probably the baby will live billions of years, again, analogies are inadequate and the math is impossible.)
All this is brand new. All this is just popping into being, just stretching itself and taking a look around, just opening its eyes and taking things in for the first time.
These matters can induce fear, or they can induce wonder. They do both in me, regularly.
Science Fiction is how I tip that balance towards the “wonder” side. Writing it organizes my obsession with our destiny, and the infintesimality of that fate compared to all that has been and will be.
We are living in the first breath of the universe.
All is up for grabs, all is yet to be fought for, again and again and again. Every day is a chance to choose wonder over fear. The stories we tell are how we shape that reality into what it will be, for better and worse.
After all those uncountable years of blackness and nothingness, when the universe is gone without ever having left, instead having emptied itself with space and speed and entropy, quantum theory predicts (so I read and choose to believe) that random fluctuations will generate another Big Bang, somewhere in that infinite blackness, and this wondrous, terrifying dance will begin again.
I choose to spend my life telling stories of wonder.
Thanks for reading them. :)
I think Rattling Brain may well become a diagnosable condition
You give some great analogies for otherwise incomprehensible ideas. The humor adds a dash of pepper!