Meatloaf may not have to pray for the end of time for as long as he thought.
Scientists are now saying that time itself may cease to exist in just a mere five billion years. They say this will occur "coincidentally, right around the time our sun is slated to die," but consider that this isn't a coincidence at all, but rather an indicator of our own live demonstration of quantum uncertainty and humans creating their own reality, unwittingly, via our own perceptions - as far as we're concerned, in a very real sense, we really are the center of the Universe.
The time-will-end theory depends on acceptance of the idea of the Multiverse (and that's an idea we fully endorse here, in case you haven't caught on), and in discussing this, the above-linked National Geographic article actually elucidates one of the most radical, dangerous, and paradigm-shattering truths there is:
"The problem with a multiverse is that anything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times, and that makes calculating probabilities seemingly impossible."
If the above sentence doesn't simultaneously terrify you, inspire you, make you burst into tears, make you start laughing like a maniac, make you want to quit your job, make you want to go lay down and try not to think about it, then you haven't truly wrapped your head around the implications of what it really means.
A related phenomenon that we're just starting to understand is the unknown structures tugging at our own universe that would have been total sci-fi fodder not long ago, but it's quickly become accepted as business as usual. There's a so-called "dark flow" towards the edge of the Universe that's causing hundreds of galaxy clusters to zoom, en masse, in the same direction at over 2.2 million miles an hour, and according to leading physicists, it is the best indicator we have of objects outside our universe and outside what we call "reality" influencing objects in our own.
When you start really grasping these concepts with the same part of your brain that you think about your day-to-day life stuff - and not just quickly filing it away in the "gosh, how bout that, aint that somethin" part of your brain - you might start caring a lot less about the little things on this rock that so many people waste their entire brief existences obsessing about (sports, politics, scrapbooking).
(Image above: the currently most distant known object in the Universe, a little something we like to call "UDFy-38135539".)
Beautiful post! Somehow, I feel Robert Anton Wilson, somewhere, smiling. :)
ReplyDeleteIt also brought to my mind Tetrascroll: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairy Tale (1975) by R. Buckminster Fuller. While ostensibly a children's book, it is actually the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Ursas, in other words, an intellectual powerhouse, albeit with a large dose of humorous charm.