( – promoted by buhdydharma )
A Diary was posted earlier on asking questions on subjects like “What is the Universe?”, etc. My response was a little lengthier than the typical “comment”, so I wanted to reframe the question below.
For awhile…
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I have actually given this question a bit of thought, and come to reject conventional thinking about the problem, which is why all the so-called accepted answers just lead off into more unresolved questions, and/or reverting to Centuries-old myth-making.
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Recall that Albert Einstein proved that Time itself was not linear, but in fact curved and flexible. This makes me think that we have to abandon conventional “linear” thinking about the Universe itself.
Recall also, that matter never disappears..but it is simply transformed into something else. For example, water evaporates and appears to be all gone, but really the matter itself still exists (just in a different form).
So therefore these questions about when did the Universe begin, how was it “created”, and such, are all moot, and not the correct approach to the analysis.
The Universe always was and always will be….only the form is changing, and it is changing constantly, (expansion, contraction, etc.).
The matter will never either go away or be “created”, only the form will change.
As for human beings, we are just one more mutation of matter, and an unpleasant one at that. I think human beings are destined to go the way of the Dinosaur — with all the Wars, the mass-violence, the mass-poverty, and all the Environmental damage borne of our own making.
As comedian George Carlin once said, Planet Earth does not need saving. Planet Earth is going to be just fine. It’s human beings that are f**cked.
There is no God.
There is no Universe.
There is no linear Time.
There is no Justice.
There is no Heaven.
There is no “Afterlife”.
There is however an unlimited supply of matter and mutation.
And there surely is Hell, for we see it all around us each and every day
of our tragic lives — and Hell always wins (just ask Dick Cheney, the dead Kennedys, or an oil-soaked pelican).
Now you know the truth, and can put down The Holy Babble, for it is written.
Groovin To The Cosmos, Baby….
[Music Selection:
Rock Group: Ten Years After,
Song: “Let The Sky Fall“,
Album/CD: “A Space In Time”   ]
And Now, A Message From George Carlin.
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No Big Bang?
You are.
The universe starts out as something “unimaginably small” thirteen and a half billion years ago, and then it expands to a point where “people” start to realize what “unimaginably small” specks they are in the grand scheme of things.
Then one day one of them (you) shows up at Docudharma and posts an essay and asks: “What is the universe?”
And the universe replies in comments.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe…
Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time
The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars
A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way
The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature
I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky
But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
It generates abstractions
The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has it’s own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world
[Hawking]
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit
From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas
[Sagan]
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds
The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we’ve waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting
and probably won’t be, one of these days.
The amount of matter is huge, but not unlimited. Einstein proved that the path of light, not time, was curved, but that time was relative and depended on the speed of the observer.
Many things are mutable but somethings are true and not mutable, and we should try to keep those things in mind.